One of the key elements of Emulex’s approach to this whole convergence solution is the whole point of calling it a converged network is to actually bring the same functions you had before to the table. It’s not much of a convergence if you use an ethernet cable to run your fibre channel protocol over it and do nothing else. You need to supply the same features you’ve enjoyed from your previous generation of NIC functionality and FC functionality, you’re just using a new physical layer.
At least, that’s what I thought. Then I started having people react to our solution and tell me how ‘nice’ it is we actually did something as simple as NIC Teaming. So I wanted to list out the functionality we offer on our 10Gb NIC part of the solution.
If you look at the traditional NIC function that has been in any server platform now for almost ten years there are a list of basic features you expect to have to ‘just work’ they can include:
- NIC Teaming
- VLAN Support
- Wake on LAN Support
- Serial over LAN support (IBM BladeCenter Feature)
- Software iSCSI Initiator and iSCSI Software Boot Support
- Preboot Execution Envrionment (PXE) support
The OneConnect platform, whether it be mezzanine card or PCIe based, offers this functionality on its NIC ports, whether physical or virtual, out of the box. In addition to that functionality, where we go above and beyond is at the hardware layer we also provide TCP Offload Engine support. With all of these technologies enabled we can still drive over 3.6m packets per second in an ethernet environment.
Moving forward with an entitlement you can easily turn on FCoE or iSCSI HBA support within the adapter as well. The upgrade process is a simple flash update that can be applied remotely or locally on the systems using our OneCommand tools.
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