Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Emulex Delivering Ethernet Technology for New Skyhawk Adapters 

Emulex Corporation today announced that it is delivering its OneConnect (Skyhawk) Ethernet technology for the new Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT) Open Compute Project (OCP) Networking (ON) 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet (40GbE) Skyhawk Ethernet adapters. The QCT ON Skyhawk Ethernet adapters are available in dual-port 10GbE and single-port 40GbE configurations, providing the flexible, high performance I/O needed for next generation workloads such as big data analytics and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

“Enterprise and scale-out data center architectures require flexible, scalable, high performance I/O connectivity to support emerging data center architectures using Open Compute-based cloud computing and integration with next generation software-defined networking (SDN) solutions,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing, Emulex. “Using Emulex industry-leading OneConnect Ethernet technology, the new QCT ON 10GbE and 40GbE Skyhawk Ethernet adapters provide optimized I/O for new workloads running in next generation data centers such as big data analytics based on Hadoop, Ethernet-based storage, OpenStack orchestration, in-memory databases, network functions virtualization (NFV) and media/content distribution workloads.”

“QCT customers rely on us to deliver data center solutions optimized for unique and specific cloud workloads,” said Mike Yang, general manager of QCT. “Networking is critical in delivering those solutions, and Emulex has been an excellent partner, working with our engineering team to maximize network performance with RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and overlay network hardware offload for applications in the cloud.”

Emulex OneConnect Ethernet technology is optimized to meet the needs of enterprises and cloud providers who are building open infrastructures and hyperscale data centers, while delivering a powerful set of features and capabilities, including:

  • Improved Efficiency and Scalability: Emulex vEngine storage and overlay network protocol offload support improves CPU utilization up to 46 percent, enabling heavier compute workloads and higher scalability with the ability to support more virtual machines (VMs) per server and build faster and more scalable hybrid cloud environments. Emulex vEngine, combined with the doubled core count and faster memory in the new Intel Xeon processors, allows customers to maintain CPU utilization thresholds and reduce CPU usage fluctuations while adding more workloads to each server. Emulex vEngine can also reduce server power consumption by up to 50 watts, which lowers the server power costs by up to 20 percent (based on average power consumption of 250 watts per server).
  • Optimized Application Performance and Delivery: Emulex OneConnect Ethernet technology enables up to a 4x performance increase in small packet network performance, vs. previous generation adapters, which is critical for transaction-heavy and clustered applications such as VDI, Web-scale applications and messaging applications. Additionally, Emulex OneConnect Ethernet technology enables adapters to offer data acceleration with RoCE fabric that helps enterprise IT and cloud data centers optimize unstructured and file-based storage environments, and improve targeted network functions such as VM mobility, which are based on Windows Server SMB Direct and Linux NFS protocols and improve VM mobility.
  • Increased Server Efficiency: Emulex vEngine storage and overlay network protocol offloads combined with the 50 percent greater core count and double the memory using the latest DDR technology in the new Intel Xeon processors, drastically increase server efficiency with the ability to support more VMs or VDIs per server.
  • Improved Quality of Service and Security: Emulex Universal Multi-Channel (UMC) support allows multiple PCI functions to be created on each adapter port. Each 10GbE port can be configured with up to eight Network Interface Card (NIC) functions or a 40GbE port can be configured with up to 16 NIC functions with granular bandwidth provisioning and will work with any 10GbE or 40GbE switch. This drives higher VM density on host servers, optimizes I/O utilization, enables Service Level Agreement (SLA) based provisioning, and simplifies deployment.
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