ISS Technology Update, Volume 7 Number 3 - Newsletter

ISS Technology Update Volume 7, Number 3
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HP 10GbE products
Server adapters
The multifunction NC510C and its fiber-based counterpart NC510F, now on the market, are the first HP 10 GbE adapters for
ProLiant servers (see Figure 1-1).
Figure 1-1. HP NC510C and NC510F PCIe 10 Gigabit server adapters (low profile bracket included)
Multifunction NC510C Fiber-based NC510F
These server adapters are ideal for a host of demanding applications, including:
• High-performance computing
• Database clusters
• Network attached storage
• Storage backups
• Grid systems
• Virtualization
• Server input/output (I/O)
• Fabric consolidation
Virtualization
One of the hottest topics in datacenter discussions is that of virtualization. The ability to configure individual servers into many
independent virtual servers has tremendous benefit. Today’s CPUs are certainly capable of supporting many virtual machines
from a processing standpoint. However, the primary deployment obstacle has been how to supply enough I/O bandwidth to
each virtual machine to keep it at maximum efficiency. The answer has been to deploy additional multi-port Gigabit (Gb)
adapters, typically from two to four per server, providing 4-8Gb/sec of bandwidth to be shared by all the virtual machines
running on that server. As the number of cores increases over time, allowing more virtual machines to run per server, the I/O
requirements increase linearly. The other problem is that as the number of ports increase so does the number of CPU cycles
required to do the TCP processing, which in turn takes away CPU cycles from each virtual machine. A ProLiant server with
10GbE support is built from the ground up with the virtualized datacenter in mind. As the virtual datacenter evolves to future
environments, the ProLiant DL and ML series servers have built-in investment protection with the highly programmable 10GbE
devices.
End-to-end solution
A true end-to-end HP10GbE solution can be achieved by combing the ProLiant 10GbE server adapters with a ProCurve 5400zl
switch, which supports 24 10-GbE ports or 144 mini-GBICs, or a combination of 10/100/1000 and 10GbE ports.