LSI Demos Single-Root I/O Virtualization Solution With Intel and Red Hat

LSI Corporation, in collaboration with Intel and Red Hat, announced the industry’s first demonstration of a single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) capable storage controller. The controller, using Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel VT-d) and PCI-SIG( SR-IOV technology, enables virtual servers in direct-attached storage (DAS) environments to share a storage controller, delivering increased system performance, efficiency and scalability.

The companies will demonstrate the solution in the Intel booth at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), September 22-24, at the Moscone Center West in San Francisco, Calif.

"The first wave of virtualization has been focused on consolidating physical servers and delivering the economic benefits of increased server utilization," said Luca Bert, director of DAS RAID Architecture and Strategic Planning, LSI Corporation. "The next wave will focus on increasing overall system and storage performance, and hardware-based SR-IOV helps achieve that goal."

The technology demonstration will feature an Intel Xeon(R) Processor 5500 Series based server, the Red Hat virtualization solution and an LSI MegaRAID storage controller running a performance benchmark on both conventional and SR-IOV based systems. The demo will showcase how the MegaRAID controller using Intel VT-d and SR-IOV technology is able to deliver SAN-like capabilities in a low-cost virtualized, direct-attached storage environment. Intel VT-d is part of Intel’s core logic that accelerates I/O virtualization by remapping I/O DMA transfers and device generated interrupts.

"Utilizing Intel VT-d with Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based platforms and SR-IOV RAID controllers helps to overcome the performance bottlenecks of virtualized solutions by shifting the burden from software implementations of hypervisors to the platform and the storage controller," said Jim Pappas, Director Industry Initiatives at Intel. "Intel is excited about the overall performance improvements and data center cost savings that Intel VT-d and PCI-SIG SR-IOV solutions can deliver to our customers."

Based on industry-standard I/O technology specifications developed by PCI-SIG, SR-IOV enables a single physical instance of the storage controller to appear as a number of virtual controllers. This allows multiple operating systems running simultaneously within a single computer to natively share PCI Express devices, resulting in dramatically increased server efficiency, improved system performance and more finely-tuned quality of service (QoS) and data security.

"Optimal virtualization solutions include consolidated storage and rapid, secure provisioning of storage. A hardware SR-IOV capable solution provides the performance, security and flexibility for data center architects to reduce their complexity and costs. This is the type of standards-based innovation that we expect from using Red Hat virtualization technology in collaboration with LSI and Intel," said Navin Thadani, senior director, Virtualization Business at Red Hat.