By Kevin Murray, Senior Marketing Manager, Emulex

One of the greatest facets of our partnership with IBM is that both Emulex and IBM love to develop new technologies that change paradigms in IT. We love to bust myths. This has never been more evident than today. Think of x86 server I/O and a common perception comes to mind. Most people believe that x86 servers, despite becoming ever more powerful, are still a commodity that will never fully tax the I/O capabilities of the server. The easiest thing to do, most people believe, is to add another 1GbE adapter to the system when needed and maintain the status quo. This is exactly the type of myth that a partnership between Emulex and IBM challenged with the launch this year of IBM’s new eX5 servers with Virtual Fabric.

We busted this myth last week in San Francisco at a fantastic eX5 launch event with special guests Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, stars of Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters. Jamie and Adam have proven their ability to solve hundreds of urban legends and other commonly held beliefs, but in this case we were lucky to have them just for entertainment purposes; and they did not disappoint. But the real myth busting that day was being done by Emulex and IBM.

IBM got us started by busting a myth about memory capacity by introducing their groundbreaking Max5 technology. This would prove to be a key point in Emulex’s own myth busting exercise a bit later. Max5 allows IBM System x and BladeCenter servers to scale memory to up to twice what other x86 systems can offer. We learned that the new Intel processors have so much performance that a typical x86 will run out of memory before maximizing the processor’s capabilities. With Max5, IBM system x and BladeCenter servers can get higher utilization from the processor, giving that server the ability to run more VMs and more applications than other servers in the same class. This can result in lower costs for software licenses as well as the hardware itself.

With the memory capacity myth officially busted, Emulex took on the myth that 10GbE Infrastructure is unnecessary. We had already learned that IBM’s new eX5 servers delivered a huge (or, as my father-in-law would say, “yooj”) increase in processing capability. But where was all that newfound horsepower supposed to go? A server is pretty useless if it doesn’t have the ability to serve users on the network. As system performance and utilization increases to never before seen levels, network traffic increases proportionally. Yesterday’s I/O cannot handle today’s bandwidth requirements. Enter Emulex 10GbE Virtual Fabric Adapters for IBM System x and BladeCenter. Yes, the Emulex VFA is a line-rate 10Gb/s Ethernet adapter with TCP Offload, but there are two features that make Emulex VFAs truly unique and essential for today’s datacenter deployments. I’ll talk about the first one today, and the second one in a future entry. The first is virtual NIC, or vNIC. vNIC is the ability for a single dual-port VFA to function as 8 separate NICs to the operating system or hypervisor.

Think about this for a minute. Prior to the VFA, you basically had 2 options when you needed more I/O bandwidth for the server. You could add more 1GbE ports, or you could upgrade to a 10GbE Infrastructure. Each of these had drawbacks. More 1GbE ports meant more cables, more switches, and more parts to manage, and you’re still operating at 1GbE so you’re still bandwidth constrained. Everyone is going to have to eventually switch to 10GbE or greater. But do every VM and every server need full 10GbE bandwidth? Probably not. With straight 10GbE, you could change all the 1GbE ports to 10GbE and solve the bandwidth issue but do nothing to fix the complexity issue; or you could try to get by with fewer 10GbE ports and sacrifice Quality of Service. Emulex VFAs for IBM System x and BladeCenter offer a better solution. Every physical port delivers 4 separate vNIC ports to the system; ports that do everything a separate physical connection can do but they do it all from a single adapter and a single 10GbE cable. Bandwidth of the vNIC ports can be tailored from as little as 100Mb/s to up to 10Gb/s (up to 10Gb/s per physical port) so it is easy to provision bandwidth to exactly what the applications requires. The vNIC capability of Emulex VFAs are what truly make them essential for any deployment using the newest IBM system x servers.

In our next edition, we’ll talk about the second unique feature of Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapters and bust the 10GbE myth once and for all.