Allied Telesis, a provider of secure IP/Ethernet switching offerings, has launched the AT-2973SX and AT-2973T virtualisation Network Interface Cards (NICs), for running virtual machines.
The company said that the AT-2973 products improve network efficiency and system performance by increasing resource sharing and utilisation, while lowering the overall cost of virtual machines. It increases throughput of the data intake and distribution process by allowing each virtual machine to establish its own network queue. a
According to Allied Telesis, the AT-2973SX is a dual-port, fiber, 1000SX gigabit peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe), four-lane virtualisation NIC; is a dual-port 1000T gigabit PCIe four-lane virtualisation NIC. It is MSI-x (message signal interrupt) capable, providing an alternative way of interrupting the host CPU to manage multiple network queues, one for each virtual machine and thereby increases utilisation.
The AT-2973 processes the data directly from the application buffers on the host computer and manages transfer to the communications engine, lowering data exchange latency of the host CPU, the company said.
In addition, the four-lane AT-2973 is also PCI-Express v2.0 compliant, moving data at 2Gbps, twice the capacity of the earlier v1.0 bus. It supports storage transport means, including iSCSI v1.0 and can be an iSER (iSCSI extension for remote direct memory access) host bus adaptor (HBA), allowing it to be the main computer (initiator) or the storage device (target) to facilitate data transfers between virtual machines and manage storage over long distances.
Nick Paredes, product marketing manager of Allied Telesis, said: Further, by meeting TAA guidelines for manufacturing, we have enhanced our suite of products to meet the standards set by Federal information technology contracts requiring the use of TAA-eligible products.