Guest blog by Dennis Martin, President of Demartek
A number of new infrastructure technologies are influencing the way next-generation datacenters are operating and performing. Consider how storage networks are being impacted by a number of technologies, such as server virtualization, cloud-based computing, media-rich applications and even the higher-performance storage offerings, such as solid-state drives.
Now, more than ever, performance matters.
I just spent a few days in the labs at Broadcom running independent tests of the company’s latest generation 10 Gb/s dual-port converged network adapters (CNAs). I’ve got a full report that I’ll be releasing next week, the same week as the Interop conference. But, ahead of that, here are some initial impressions of my time in the lab.
Once again, Broadcom has cranked up the performance, exceeding the already impressive results from the previous generation of adapters. With its BCM957810 adapter, Broadcom has combined many functions onto one ASIC chip, increased the performance of the onboard processors and improved the power efficiency compared to their previous product.
Tests of that earlier product – the BCM957712 – outperformed the competition, achieving 1.7 million I/Os per second. This next-generation adapter clocked 2.5 million I/Os per second for random reads via Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), a 47 percent increase that’s now 200 percent faster than the competition. Over iSCSI, the reads came in at an impressive 1.5 million IOs per second or 100% faster than the competition.
It’s also worth noting that the next-generation BCM957810 is a full “offload” CNA, meaning that it fully offloads both FCoE and iSCSI processing onto the adapter, reducing overhead on the host CPU. It also fully offloads TCP/IP processing with its TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE), further reducing the load on the host CPU.
This is just a sampling of the information that will be in my full report, which will be made available in the coming days.
Editor’s Note: Dennis Martin is President of Demartek, a research analyst firm. He wrote this guest post for the Broadcom Connected blog. When released, Dennis Martin’s report will be posted on Broadcom’s site and promoted via the Broadcom Connected Blog, as well as the Twitter, Facebook and Google+ pages.
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