ACADEMIA

Solarflare announced a new SPECvirt virtualization benchmark record with its 10GbE server adapter.

The test environment included Solarflare's SFN5122F 10GbE server adapter utilizing SR-IOV (single root I/O virtualization) and running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 operating system on an HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server. The test results establish a new scalability SPECvirt_sc2010 record with 8956@552 VMs. This is an increase of 21 percent from the previous record.

The benchmark results highlight Solarflare's SR-IOV support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor and for Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a guest. Solarflare enables leading 10GbE performance by reducing CPU utilization, increasing bandwidth and decreasing latency. In addition, Solarflare's hybrid SR-IOV model provides direct guest access for application acceleration, while maintaining support of the management and high availability features of the hypervisor, such as live migration.

Solarflare server adapters provide the industry's highest line-rate performance and most scalable architecture for today's demanding applications. Featuring kernel and hypervisor bypass, the company's products alleviate I/O bottlenecks and provide IT managers the ability to allocate server I/O resources directly to physical and virtualized applications.

"This benchmark validates the system-level performance our unique server adapter provides," said Mike Smith, VP / GM of host solutions at Solarflare. "Our virtualized hardware architecture and hybrid SR-IOV solution clearly enables unmatched performance. Equally important, it allows customers to use their existing virtualization management applications such as live migration, teaming and network failover."

"Red Hat has a unique approach to collaborative engineering and testing that helps Red Hat Enterprise Linux to perform and scale effectively in large, virtualized enterprise computing environments," said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager, Platform Business Unit, Red Hat, Inc. "The SPECvirt benchmark results verify that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with the KVM hypervisor can effectively accommodate heavy workloads for optimized performance."

"In today's evolving business landscape, enterprises need flexible, high-performance virtualization solutions to quickly address changing demands," said Martin Whittaker, vice president, Systems and Solutions Engineering, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, HP. "HP ProLiant servers help enterprises create agile, high-performing, virtual IT environments that increase competitive advantage."

The SPECvirt_sc2010 is a vendor-neutral benchmark from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp (SPEC) that measures the end-to-end maximum performance of data center servers used for virtual server consolidation. The benchmark uses workloads representative of server virtualization, including mail servers, database servers, applications servers, web servers and file servers. Scaling is achieved by running additional sets of virtual machines (called "tiles") until overall throughput reaches a peak or workloads fail to meet required quality of service (QoS) criteria.