Overview

NetXen's Intelligent NIC^® provides network I/O processing capabilities at multi-gigabit and 10 Gigabit speeds.

The key technology breakthrough and genesis of NetXen is the Protocol Processing Engine, a purpose-built processor with a patented architecture that provides state-machine-like performance for I/O processing tasks, while being fully programmable. This engine allows NetXen Intelligent NICs to achieve unprecedented levels of performance. And it does so in a manner that permits our products to continue to evolve, adapt and extend to meet the ever-changing IT requirements of the Agile Datacenter™.

The Protocol Processing Engine's high instruction throughput, low latency and low power consumption make it ideal for network I/O applications. The Protocol Processing Engine forms the basis of our Intelligent NIC product portfolio and gives our solutions the capabilities essential for handling key network demands driven by the transition to 10GbE.

Solving critical problems in the IT environment

In servers, the transition to 10GbE is being driven by the rise of converged IP based interconnect fabrics that combine networking, clustering and storage - represented by TCP/IP, iWarp and iSCSI, respectively - on a single pipe. It's also being driven by server consolidation, which is increasing overall system utilization and consequently network I/O bandwidth. Converged networks and server virtualization provide obvious benefits, but also create major challenges for the IT environment. Just the TCP/IP processing overhead implied by these protocols can saturate multiple CPUs, leaving no cycles for application processing. Additionally, RDMA protocols like iWarp require extremely low processing latency - something that cannot be assured with host based processing that must contend with other applications for CPU and memory resources. Moreover, as storage over IP becomes more prevalent, it will continue to drive up bandwidth and consequently, CPU utilization on these fabrics. Even only these very basic transport protocols cannot be efficiently processed on a host CPU.

Server consolidation initiatives are also putting a burden on the network subsystem that was not present previously. Today the host manages multiple virtual instantiations of the NIC - but at significant cost in terms of performance even at 1 Gigabit. In order to continue to scale in a virtualized environment at 10 Gigabit speeds, the NIC must support further optimizations for this shared I/O environment, while at the same time being able to support and manage multiple protocols in this environment. Host CPUs can handle multiple protocols in a 1 Gigabit environment, but at 10 Gigabit speeds, in combination with multiple virtual NICs, each of which supports multiple protocols, this clearly will not work. A new approach is required. The NetXen Intelligent NIC is the ideal solution.

Additionally, many of today's protocols (including TCP/IP) are in a constant state of evolution from simple things like new congestion-management algorithms and QoS schemes, to the more extensive changes required for iSER (iSCSI over RDMA). A hard-wired approach to handling these protocols is risky. Worse, given the length of silicon development cycles, hard-wired solutions are likely to be out of date before they ever get to production. The programmability of the NetXen Intelligent NIC addresses this issue and will protect the IT manager's hardware investment.

Security is another major issue for enterprises and will become more important in the Agile Datacenter. At the perimeter, transactional security protocols such as SSL and IPSEC are being used increasingly on the Internet. IDS/IPS solutions are also being widely deployed to protect against Denial-of-Service attacks. However, in the Agile Datacenter, it is no longer sufficient to have only a security perimeter, as the whole concept of a physical perimeter is abstracted away in a virtualized datacenter. In this type of environment, certain aspects of perimeter and transactional security will have to be driven into the end points:

	DMZ firewalls will be replaced with access-control type firewalls based on user authentication at the server
	Converged fabrics will require IPSEC and SSL to be used extensively within the datacenter, as various types of secure traffic will be co-mingled on the wire.

The handling of these tasks will add a tremendous I/O processing load to servers, on top of the basic transport protocols that are already saturating these systems. Host CPUs simply cannot cope with security processing at gigabit and multi-gigabit speeds. Again, the Intelligent NIC from NetXen addresses this need. It's the optimum solution for issues related to convergence, adaptability and security.

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