Last year, Intel launched the Xeon 5500 processor series with its Nehalem microarchitecture. The combination of this next-generation processor and new platform architectures with new memory and I/O subsystems has delivered game-changing improvements in performance, virtualization and energy efficiency. And with research indicating accelerated ROI when upgrading to these new servers, data centers are replacing their old single-core servers with these high-performance multi-core servers that are available from all of the major server manufacturers, including Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel and Sun.
Here at Emulex Labs, we tested these new servers and were frankly quite impressed with their performance. Using our LightPulse 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs, a single two-socket server was able to generate over a million IOPS! Now that’s complementary technology ideal for I/O-intensive applications and virtualized server environments. So, we asked one of our resident technology gurus, Jon Krueger, to explain how customers can leverage the Xeon 5500 and our 8Gb/s Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) to achieve maximum performance and scalable virtualization.
In this Chalk Talk, Jon describes a typical two-way server based on the Xeon 5500 with its integrated memory controller and Quick Path Interconnect, and discusses why this is a NUMA architecture. Jon then explains how our 8Gb/s HBAs connected to a Storage Area Network (SAN) deliver tremendous bandwidth and how we leverage the NUMA architecture to achieve maximum performance with our Dynamic Interrupt redirection using MSI-X. Jon also provides a good-use case around server virtualization and walks through how our 8Gb/s HBAs built for massive workloads and featuring N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) help to address potential I/O bottlenecks and I/O management concerns that can exist when scaling the number of virtual machines on a server.
We hope you found this Chalk Talk informative. If you are interested in additional Chalk Talks, please leave a reply below with your suggestion. Thanks for reading and watching. We’ll see you next time at Emulex Labs.
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