Overview
Intel’s family of adapters, the Intel®Ethernet Converged Network Adapter,X520 with SFP+ connectivity, are the most flexible and scalable Ethernet adapters for today’s demanding data center environments.
Data center
networks are being pushed to their limits.The escalating deployments of servers with multi-core processors and demandingapplications such as High Performance
Computing (HPC), database clusters, and video-on-demand are driving the need for
10 Gbps connections. Customers require flexible and scalable I/O solutions to meet
the rigorous requirements of running mission-critical applications in virtualized
and unified storage environments.Powered by Intel’s third-generation 10 GbE network controller, the Intel® Ethernet 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller,the X520 adapter family addresses the demanding needs of the next-generation data center by providing unmatched features for virtualization, flexibility for
LAN and SAN networking, and proven,reliable performance.
Best Choice for Virtualization
The explosive growth in virtualization is leading to an increasing demand fornetwork performance. With more Virtual
Machines (VMs) running on each multi-core server, networking traffic is dramatically increased, with each VM competing for available I/O bandwidth. Intel’s family of Intel Ethernet Converged Network
Adapter X520 addresses networking bottlenecks in virtualized environments.
These adapters enable network-intensive applications to achieve the performance ,expected in a virtualized environment.The Intel Ethernet X520 family of adapters provides the best networking performance available in the industry,whether the physical port is configured in an emulation mode using the virtual switch in the Virtual Machine Monitor(VMM), or is directly assigned to avirtual machine. In the emulation mode,
Intel’s I/O technology, Virtual Machine
Device queues1 (VMDq) optimizes
network performance by offloading data
sorting and copying from the software
Virtual Switch in the VMM to the Intel
Ethernet 82599 10 Gigabit Controller.This configuration is best suited for a large number of VMs running standard applications that have limited bandwidthand latency requirements.
For mission-critical applications, where dedicated I/O is required for maximum network performance, users can assign a dedicated virtual adapter port to a VM.
Using the PCI-SIG SR-IOV capability on an Intel Ethernet X520 adapter provides direct VM connectivity and data protectionacross VMs. SR-IOV technology enables the data to bypass the software virtual switch
and provides near-native performance. It assigns either physical or virtual I/O ports to individual VMs directly. This technology is best suited for applications that demand the highest I/O throughput and lowest latency performance such as database, storage, financial and other applications.