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Tuesday Feb 20, 2007

Bye Bye Network Bottlenecks

Networking may well be the most important interface on today's computer and server systems. Yet, the explosive demand for increased network services has created major bottlenecks at the network interface. The rule of thumb is this – 1 gigabit of bandwidth requires a gigahertz processor. If you have a 10Gb Ethernet coming in, you need a 10 gigahertz CPU to perform that functionality. That's a lot of power and overhead to handle basic filtering.

Hal Stern, Sun's Vice President of Global Systems Engineering welcomes three distinguished guests to this edition of Innovating@Sun. Distinguished Engineers Shimon Muller, Erik Nordmark, and Ashley Saulsbury, join Stern for a lively technical discussion around Project Neptune and today's networking issues. Topics of discussion include:

Project Neptune: the industry's first multithreaded 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology enabling massive acceleration in application and networking performance across X64, SPARC, and CMT architectures

How fast is “fast?” (hint: Sun's Neptune technology has two 10Gb Ethernet ports that can also run at 1G speeds if necessary).

Addressing trends of parallelism and multithreading

How Sun's latest innovation takes the effect of the network and breaks it into smaller workloads that can be spread out to the threads.

Virtualization at the network system level

How the value of Ethernet technology is measured at cost per gigabit and Sun's solution offers 10X the throughput at 1/3 the cost.

Sun's unique advantage as owner of the entire stack – from the OS, to the applications, to the wire

Networking of the future with processors and systems that go to hundreds and thousands of threads and Ethernet technology that goes up to 100 Gb per second.

The Bottom Line for Business
With increased bandwidth of 10 Gb Ethernet, businesses can provide more services, faster, to more customers, and do so with fewer servers in their datacenters. It also means they can serve more customers per system, thus lowering the overall cost to serve.