Sun's New Virtual NEM Makes Blade Networking and I/O Easy and Affordable
Sun's new Virtual NEM (Network Express Module) is an incredibly cost efficient way to connect multiple blade servers to networks and I/O. With a list price of less than $500 per blade server, Sun's new Virtual NEM reduces cabling by 10:1, eliminates management and interoperability problems, and provides wire speed 10GbE performance to each blade. Our virtual NEM not only runs with the latest AMD and Intel based Sun Blade modules running Solaris, Linux, or Windows, it also works with our SSD Flash accelerated UltraSPARC blades and is ready to work with Intel's soon to be announced Nehalem CPUs. Even if you have been happy with the performance of 1GbE ethernet, get ready to upgrade to 10GbE. Technology marches on and CPU advances like the hardware multi-threading in Sun's 8-core UltraSPARC T2 processor and Intel's 4-core Nehalem processor, along with SSD Flash acceleration that Sun is shipping today on blades, ensures 10GbE will become a common requirement soon for more and more blades.
Of course blades don't need to connect just to networks and network storage like the Sun Storage 7000. Sometimes you need to directly connect your blades to storage. HP charges nearly an extra $4000 for their blade SAS switch to connect blades to external shared storage, functionality you get included in the base price with Sun's Virtual NEM.
So it is pretty simple. If you need easy and affordable blade networking and I/O, check out Sun blade servers with our new Virtual NEM.
Mark, this sounds interesting. We're running ESX 3.5 on X6250s, but 10GbE support on them is nonexistent. Would this help? The price per port is certainly interesting.
Posted by Charles Soto on March 20, 2009 at 07:34 AM PDT #
I will check and see if our virtual NEM requires VMware certification. While the x6250 is certainly on the VMware certification list, they sometimes require separate certification down to very specific components like the actual ethernet chipset used. The good news is that unlike embedding a switch or a hub in your blade chassis, Sun's virtual NEM is essentially transparent to your network. Technically, it is a multi-root NIC, a term which probably requires some explaining. I will post a followup-blog with some diagrams that explain better what a multi-root NIC is, but basically you connect the Sun Virtual NEM to an external 10GbE switch with a single ethernet cable, and to the external switch it appears that there are actually ten separate 10GbE connections, only it uses up just one port on your external switch.
Posted by Marc Hamilton on March 20, 2009 at 07:56 AM PDT #
This looks like the 10GigE connectivity is using MR-IOV, or a simplified version of it. Is this the case?
Posted by Mark on March 20, 2009 at 09:02 AM PDT #
Marc (got it right this time ;), I understood the concept of the multiroot NIC. I was just wondering if the "virtualness" is done in the NEM itself, or if it requires special software in the OS (e.g. this is dependent on crossbow or somesuch). The former would be rather cool (I believe in OS-agnostic hardware), while the latter would be rather limiting. Those diagrammes would be appreciated.
Posted by Charles Soto on March 20, 2009 at 12:25 PM PDT #