With all of the technical solutions available today, improving application performance can come down to one main aspect: speed. Due to the ever-increasing proliferation of data, your application will need additional performance capabilities as workloads become more demanding. To stay ahead of the curve and meet your customers’ evolving expectations, Intel is launching a new family of controllers for 100 gigabit Ethernet connectivity.
The Intel Ethernet 800 (E810) series is purpose-built to move data faster while supporting a variety of workloads. The 800 series improves application performance, packet processing efficiency, and storage performance, all of which combine for a highly-optimized customer experience. Below, we take a closer look at the new E810.
Application device queues (ADQ) benefit overall system performance
As data loads increase and workloads grow more complex, connectivity is more important than ever for overall system performance. An Ethernet overloaded with traffic can impact workloads and drag your application’s performance levels below customer SLAs. Scalable and predictable application-level performance is, therefore, a necessity in the modern data center. With this in mind, Intel developed Application Device Queues (ADQ), an application-specific queuing and steering technology that is built into the Intel Ethernet 800 series.
ADQ works by filtering application traffic to a dedicated set of queues that would otherwise be intermixed with other traffic types. Think of it as a highway express lane service that gives critical applications fast and dedicated lanes. With its ability to filter application traffic to a dedicated set of queues, connect application threads of execution to specific queues within the queue set, and control bandwidth by limiting what is received and transmitted out, ADQ significantly increases application predictability, reduces application latency, and improves application throughput. Your application will enter the fast lane, and your customers will benefit from unparalleled performance predictability thanks to ADQ.
Dynamic device personalization (DDP) optimizes packet processing
In addition to increased traffic levels, modern data centers face an evolving set of protocols and packet types that Ethernet controllers must support for optimized application functionality. Many of these protocols are not yet supported by generally available firmware. While the Intel Ethernet 700 series supported most common protocols, many organizations need more today.
The E810 includes enhanced Dynamic Device Personalization (DDP) functionality, giving customers a fully programmable pipeline to support a wider range of protocols and packet types. DDP now allows more protocols to be added in a DDP profile package. It offers baseline support for well-known protocols and queuing configurations, including tunneling protocol support, as defined by IETF NVO3 specifications, such as VXLAN, GENEVE, VXLAN-GRE, and NVGRE. With workload-specific protocols and configuration options now available, overall packet processing efficiency increases, and faster processing is the result.
Improve storage and HPC workload performance with iWARP and RoCEv2 RDMA support
While organizations deploy high-performance computing (HPC) to process more data than ever before, they must store more data as well. To support fast data transfer for high-performance storage and provide customers more flexibility, the Intel Ethernet 800 series features support for both iWARP and RoCEv2 remote direct memory access (RDMA) that are selectable per port via software. RDMA is a host-offload, host-bypass technology, that enables direct memory access from the memory of one computer into that of another over a network, without involving either computer’s processor, cache, or operating system. This eliminates the three major sources of networking overhead: TCP/IP stack process, memory copies, and application context switches, and results in high throughput and low-latency performance boosts for modern high-speed Ethernet. Your customers will experience improved ease of use and scaling abilities for storage and HPC workloads.
Partner with UNICOM Engineering: A value-added systems integrator
With larger quantities of data traversing the network than ever before and workloads becoming increasingly complex, speed and connectivity are growing challenges for nearly every organization. The Intel Ethernet 800 series directly addresses these challenges, with several new developments all aimed at getting data where it needs to go faster. At UNICOM Engineering, our deep partnerships with industry leaders, such as Intel, allows us access and training on the latest best-in-class technology, such as the Ethernet 800 series, which we can integrate into your final solution, ensuring the performance of your application is optimized. Contact us today at (972) 633-3400 or visit www.unicomengineering.com to learn more about how we can optimize your solutions and speed time to market.