Last week HP announced that it has integrated NetXen's intelligent, 10-gigabit network controllers into the HP Multifunction Network Adapters for the ProLiant family of servers. This is the first 10-gig NIC to become available in ProLiants, and it may be the first "multifunction" 10-gig NIC available anywhere. The functions the smart NICs promise to handle are TCP/IP offloading (TOE), RDMA, and iSCSI acceleratio Last week HP announced that it has integrated NetXen’s intelligent, 10-gigabit network controllers into the HP Multifunction Network Adapters for the ProLiant family of servers. This is the first 10-gig NIC to become available in ProLiants, and it may be the first “multifunction” 10-gig NIC available anywhere. The functions the smart NICs promise to handle are TCP/IP offloading (TOE), RDMA, and iSCSI acceleration. Eventually they might also include I/O virtualization, but none of these is in the cards quite yet. Rather, HP ProLiant guy Steve Cumings reports that they’ll “roll out at regular intervals in the future. The first will be TOE, expected in a few months.” Cumings expects the 10-gig NICs to get an immediate warm welcome from customers running high-performance compute clusters, and that they’ll also appeal to more mainstream customers who are consolidating servers using virtual machines or who want to consolidate networking, iSCSI storage, and management data streams through a single data link. Cumings didn’t reveal HP’s plans for NetXen’s I/O virtualization capabilities, which NetXen unveiled September 18. Called NetSlice, the I/O virtualization firmware provides a number of functions aimed at eliminating the gross processing overhead associated with hypervisors, such as VMware and Xen, handling I/O data transfers for multiple virtual machines. (For an elegant description of the problem, see Tom Yager.) In the near to mid term, NetXen vows to remove the hypervisor from the data path, without compromising its control functions. The company also promises to leverage standards for I/O virtualization (currently being considered by the PCI-SIG I/O Virtualization Workgroup) as they emerge, though the wait may be a year or more. Meanwhile, both HP and NetXen are mum. “We are planning on delivering a couple of different solutions for virtual I/O, but unfortunately because they are future solutions we can’t talk about them yet,” said Cumings. Added NetXen’s CEO, Govind Kizhepat, “You will see a flurry of releases in the near term future. We don’t want to specifically comment about what will come when. It will be an ongoing, rolling thunder of releases.” Technology Industry