BladeEngine 3 is a single-chip, dual-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) Ethernet Controller targeting enterprise applications requiring 10Gb/s wire-speed performance, multi-protocol offload capabilities and advanced I/O virtualization. The BladeEngine 3 controller has two 10 GbE interfaces that support XAUI, CX-4, KR and KX-4 physical interfaces, and an x8 PCI-Express Gen2 host bus interface. Dual 10GbE network ports can be configured as active/active or active/passive modes of operation.   BladeEngine 3 also supports quad-port  Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and a mix of dual-port 10GbE and GbE.

The BladeEngine 3 controller is built around an array of eight programmable packet engines (PEs), plus an additional ARM9 processor. By offloading TCP/IP, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI protocol processing from the host CPU to dedicated PEs, BladeEngine 3 delivers a highly integrated, low power, high performance 10GbE solution ideal for accelerating network and storage application performance on servers and storage systems.

I/O Virtualization technology is a key technology for BladeEngine 3 controllers, allowing network and storage resources to be carved up into multiple hardware-isolated and protected virtual network and virtual storage interfaces.  Virtual network and virtual storage interfaces can be assigned to virtual machines to realize near-native performance. Fine-grain QoS management features allow precise bandwidth allocation and management for individual virtual network and storage interfaces through centralized policies using industry-standard management APIs.     BladeEngine 3 addresses the need for advanced enterprise class I/O virtualization with driver support for VMware ESX, Linux KVM, Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.

BladeEngine controllers are a key component of the Emulex OneConnect™ Universal Converged Network Adapter product line that provides10 GbE server connectivity for networking and storage with high-performance protocol offloads for TCP/IP, TCP Chimney Offload Engine (TOE), iSCSI and FCoE. 

Key Features

• Dual 10-Gbps MAC and Dual XAUI™/10GBASE-CX4/10GBASE-KX4/10GBASE-KR interfaces
• Full hardware based TCP/IP offload including fragmentation, reassembly and out-of-order processing to minimize host CPU utilization and maximize multi-core applications processing
• Complete FCoE offload based on ten generations of field-proven Emulex LightPulse™ Fibre Channel adapters
• Complete iSCSI offload including header and data digests, supported by third generation iSCSI software
• Large on-chip buffers, assisted by innovative cache architecture, maximizes performance and reduces the number of external components and memories required

Target Applications

• Blade servers
• Enterprise servers
• Web Servers
• High-performance clustered servers
• Network Attached Storage
• iSCSI target controllers