Hitachi Selects Neterion for 10GbE

Neterion, Inc. and its exclusive partner in Japan, Hitachi High-Technologies Corp. (HHT) will supply the Hitachi BladeSymphony 2000 line of servers with its third generation I/O Virtualized 10 GbE adapter. The option is available to the general public immediately, across all geographies.

The BladeSymphony 2000 is Hitachi’s most advanced blade architecture so far, with world-class reliability features, designed for mission critical applications. The new high-end, enterprise blade system features dual-socketed Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series, which have been created using Intel’s CPU microarchitecture codenamed Nehalem. Its high-density design hosts up to 8 blades and 16 I/O slots in a 10U chassis. A high-bandwidth, hybrid I/O subsystem leverages both industry-standard PCIe Gen2.0 slots and integrated switches, allowing configurations to share a common switching infrastructure and unique I/O interfaces per blade, enabling the most I/O-intensive workloads and consolidation through virtualization.

Out of a full field of competitors, Neterion’s 10 GbE adapter was selected by Hitachi for its strong track record in robustness and virtualization. Proven by nearly a decade of design wins in the enterprise server market, on high-end platforms such as IBM’s System p and Hewlett-Packard’s Integrity systems, Neterion offers the most advanced reliability, availability and scalability features (RAS) in the industry.

On the virtualization front,
Neterion out showed the field
with groundbreaking innovations, such as:

• Integrated Hypervisor Offload (Hy-O) technology, which reduces dramatically the Hypervisor’s CPU utilization, allowing greater VM density per platform and the deployment of I/O-intensive applications
• Neterion’s hardware-based I/O Quality of Service (IOQoS) technology, which enables IT managers to implement true I/O isolation and bandwidth guarantees for each workload
• Neterion’s unique Virtual Link Technology (VLT), which presents the adapter to the system as up to 17 fully independent controllers

Thanks to these technologies, IT managers can take full advantage of Neterion’s virtualization features today, with no change to the operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows® Server 2008 Hyper-V, VMware ESX / vSphere. In addition, it is a safe, future-proof choice, ready for the migration to industry-standard Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) when it becomes available in these environments.

“We designed the new BladeSymphony 2000 line for the most demanding enterprise environments, seeking maximum consolidation and workload optimization,” stated Mr. Toshiaki Kawamura, General Manager of Server Operation II, Enterprise Server Division, Hitachi, Ltd. “This is why Hitachi selected Neterion’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter, which offers the highest virtualization potential, and will grow with our customers over the long haul, as virtualization expands its footprint in their datacenters.”

“We are very pleased that Hitachi BladeSymphony has selected Neterion and HHT,” noted Mr. Keita Miyoshi, General Manager, Opt-Communication Department, Electronic Materials Div., of Hitachi High-Technologies. “10 Gigabit Ethernet has proved to play a key role in server consolidation and Neterion’s world-class virtualization features definitely strengthen Hitachi’s competitive position in the blade market.”

“Neterion is honored to have been selected by Hitachi, the leading Japanese IT technology provider,” said Todd Oseth, President and CEO of Neterion. “Our latest generation of 10 GbE adapters was designed from the ground up for enterprise-class reliability and unparalleled virtualization; this latest win demonstrates that the investments we have made for many years in RAS and IOV were right, and is a clear validation of our long term strategy.”

HHT is leading the Japanese sales effort for Neterion. Since signing an agreement in February 2005, HHT has been the exclusive distributor for the Neterion family of 10 GbE controllers in Japan. HHT is a global company with 25 offices in Japan and 63 offices outside of Japan in twenty-eight countries.