If you’ve been following recent trends in the server market, you must be as excited as we are here at Broadcom about the upcoming roll out of Intel’s Romley processors, and the subsequent roll out of Romley-based products from server OEMs.   
As the volume of network traffic, networked devices and huge amounts of data continue to ramp at alarming rates, current server and I/O architectures are under the gun to deliver.
With increasing demands for server virtualization, cloud computing, and I/O intensive applications, the need for greater processing capabilities in enterprise networks and data centers is paramount.
New technologies being deployed to meet these needs include 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) server networking solutions; NIC Partitioning, Data Center Bridging/Lossless Ethernet, Fibre Channel-over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI (over Lossless Ethernet), and last but certainly not least, Modular/Flexible LAN-on-Motherboard (LOM)/Daughter Cards.
The trend toward server virtualization has resulted in the deployment of multiple network connections per server. Given the diversity of traffic that a converged 10GbE network can now handle, some 10GbE adapters, including Broadcom’s (shameless plug #1), offer NIC partitioning or separate virtual fabrics that enable a single 10GbE port to be divided into a number of separate ports. Each of these partitions needs multiple queues behind them that allow the controller to steer traffic into separate queues based on Ethernet addresses and other header information (i.e. a hardware-managed 4-Tupple HASH, for those of you who really like details). This is imperative to spread traffic processing across the many processor cores that will soon be available with Romley-based servers. It’s also a unique capability found on Broadcom 10GbE controllers (shameless plug #2).
With the introduction of Romley-based servers over the next few months, we look forward to seeing Broadcom networking technology widely deployed – aligning high-performance Romley processing with high-performance networking and storage.
Want to learn more?
Read this report on Server I/O Considerations, recently published by Crehan Research for Broadcom.
Check out this EE Times story on how Intel’s Romley is Poised to Roil the Data Center.