Company Executives Will Showcase and Discuss Latest 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller/LOM Products Optimized for Virtualized Environments

Solarflare Communications will demonstrate its latest chip technology in a variety of accelerated virtualized server environments at VMworld 2009, August 31-September 3 in the Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA. Additionally, Dr. Steve Pope, Solarflare CTO of Controllers, and Dr. Bruce Tolley, vice president of corporate marketing for Solarflare, will speak on recent trends driving the need for 10 Gigabit networking and server IO virtualization and the need for performance, flexibility and scalability in a virtualized data center.

Solarflare, booth #1437, will have three product demonstrations highlighting industry-leading 10GbE technology, including the newest Solarstorm 10GbE controller family with the first fully-integrated 10GBASE-T LAN-on-Motherboard (LOM) chip.

1. Solarflare will demonstrate a highly-available, virtualized, converged data center network. The demo will showcase Solarflare’s low-power, high-performance Solarstorm server adapters that are VMware Ready and IOVP certified supporting a cluster of virtual servers. The switching layer is delivered with a Cisco Catalyst 4900M 10GbE top of rack switch with both SFP+ and 10GBASE-T connections and the server virtualization and clustering technology is delivered with VMware vSphere 4 using Dell servers.
2. The flexible vNIC demonstration will highlight the Solarstorm server adapter’s scalable, virtualized architecture, supporting 100s of virtual machines and 1000s of vNICs. The Solarstorm vNIC architecture provides flexible mapping of vNICs, so that each guest OS can have its own vNIC, as well as traffic management, enabling prioritization and isolation of IP flows between vNICs.
3. Shown at both the Solarflare and AMD (#1408) booth, the Direct Path demonstration will show near-native network performance for virtualized 10GbE using VMware DirectPath technology with Solarstorm server adapters and AMD’s I/O memory management unit (IOMMU). The IOMMU extends the AMD64 system architecture with support for address translation and access protection on DMA transfers by peripheral devices.

To view a demo of Solarflare’s controller and adapter technology at VMworld, please contact solarflare@lewispr.com.

Presenting at the Cisco booth #2118 Tuesday, September 1, 5:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Dr. Tolley will speak on “10 Gigabit Ethernet and Server I/O Virtualization in VMware and other OS-V environments.” His talk will review the fundamental trends driving the deployment of 10GbE low-latency networking and server I/O virtualization.

To be held at the VMworld Solutions Exchange Theater, Tuesday at 12:30 pm and AMD’s booth #1408, Tuesday, September 1, 3:00 pm, Dr. Pope will speak on “IOV Devices, Performance and Challenges.” His talk will quantify the performance benefits from IOV operation for 10GbE and outline the control plane challenges.

“Server virtualization continues to see increased adoption in data centers, with a strong focus on power and efficiency,” said Pope. “Our product demonstrations at VMworld 2009 prove 10GbE delivers unparalleled performance and power efficiency in a virtualized environment. Our newest controller family features a fully virtualized architecture, supporting 10 times the number of virtual machines and virtual NICs as the leading competitors.”