SCIENCE

Solarflare will showcase its 10GbE sever adapters with single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) for Project Boston, the latest version of Citrix XenServer currently in beta, at Citrix Synergy 2011 in San Francisco, May 24-27, booth #640. Ideal for scale-out networking such as big data and social media applications, as well as cloud networking and server virtualization in next-generation data centers, Solarflare's 10GbE adapter and software solutions are engineered from the ground up to deliver high performance.

An industry first, Solarflare's SR-IOV solution offers IT and data center managers the ability to improve virtualized network I/O performance, while maintaining access to the flexibility and feature richness of the hypervisor. Solarflare has worked with Citrix to develop a unique hybrid approach to SR-IOV for XenServer that delivers unprecedented cut-through performance. As a result, servers that use the next version of XenServer for virtualization and Solarflare's 10GbE adapters will get both accelerated network performance and hypervisor services and management functions, such as virtual machine motion, clustering, high availability and VLANs.

"Solarflare has been dedicated to the innovation of advanced virtualization features and accelerated network I/O for Xen and XenServer. We welcome the company's support of Project Boston," said Simon Crosby, CTO of data center and cloud at Citrix Systems.

Leveraging Solarflare's SR-IOV solution, IT managers get the flexibility of 254 SR-IOV virtual functions (VFs), each of which can be mapped to multiple Solarflare DMA queue pairs, called virtual NICs or vNICs. The vNICs, in turn, can be exposed through the VF to a virtual machine (VM) or guest application. This allows each VM to have multiple transmit and receive queues. Solarflare's unique Smart Flow Managemen feature supports the management of these queues, allocating network traffic across the multiple guests to help scale performance over the available server CPU cores, enabling unsurpassed core-scaling capabilities.

Solarflare's Smart Flow Management and its scalable vNIC architecture are implemented with multiple patented inventions, including, but not limited to, a DMA engine, event batching of transmissions, management of deep queues and rate pacing, which enables Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning in hardware at Layer 2/3/4 for vNICs.

"Customers are dealing with numerous technical challenges in their networks, including traffic bottlenecks and inadequate performance in the server access layer, when they want to build scale-out networks for big data, virtualized data centers or cloud networking," said Russell Stern, CEO at Solarflare. "Solarflare's unique hybrid approach to SR-IOV enables IT managers to accelerate guest applications, while maintaining access to all the features provided by the hypervisor."

If you're interested in scheduling an appointment to view Solarflare's solutions at Citrix Synergy, please contact Brittney Wolff at solarflare@lewispr.com. Solarflare will also be running a drawing for attendees that stop-by booth #640 to win an Apple iPad 2.