ACADEMIA

Neterion announced that Xframe II, an adapter based on the PCI-X 2.0 bus architecture with Double Date Rate technology, used AMD Opteron processors to set a new record for the network bandwidth. The performance testing was conducted and monitored in AMD’s performance labs in Austin, TX. Uni-directional traffic sustained a level of ~9.86 Gigabits per second, virtually reaching the nominal line-rate of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, to easily eclipse the earlier record of ~7.7 Gbps held by Neterion. At ~14.5 Gbps, bi-directional traffic rates nearly doubled the previous number. Today, Neterion will publish a document on their Web site providing complete detail on the uni-directional, bi-directional traffic rates achieved, the server configuration, CPU utilization and measurement methodologies. These speeds were achieved by employing Xframe's hardware-assist architecture that continues to offer the fastest performance in the industry, unlike other non-standard solutions like TCP/IP Offload Engines and other OS by-pass TCP/IP patches. Those proposed solutions will not scale with server processors and they introduce severe security and complexity issues in the network. “These record-breaking results indicate that the AMD Opteron processor’s superior design and Xframe’s optimized architecture are an ideal combination for achieving levels of low latency and high performance required for networked server and storage applications in data centers,” noted Dave Zabrowski, President & CEO of Neterion. The testing also demonstrated best-in-class CPU utilization (less than 15% observed), leaving the vast majority of the CPU cycles available to process applications. “Neterion’s accomplishments are just more proof points of the performance gains when implementing AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture,” said Pat Patla, director, server/workstation marketing, Microprocessor Solutions Sector, AMD. “These impressive benchmarks are helping set new standards, and AMD provides the backbone - pushing the performance envelope with AMD64 technology and the recent introduction of Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors.”