Allied Telesis AT-2973SX and AT-2973T virtualisation NICs

Allied Telesis has launched the AT-2973SX and AT-2973T virtualisation network interface cards (NICs), the company’s first product for servers running virtual machines.

The cards improve network efficiency and system performance by increasing resource sharing and utilisation.

The cards increase throughput of the data intake and distribution process by allowing each virtual machine to establish its own network queue.

The AT-2973SX is a dual-port, fibre, 1000SX Gb PCIe, four-lane virtualisation NIC; the AT-2973T is a dual-port 1000T Gb PCIe four-lane virtualisation NIC. The AT-2973 is message signal interrupt (MSI-x) capable, providing an alternative way of interrupting the host CPU to manage multiple network queues, one for each virtual machine.

The cards process the data directly from the application buffers on the host computer and manage transfer to the communications engine, lowering data exchange latency of the host CPU. The four-lane AT-2973 is also PCIExpress v2.0 compliant, moving data at 2 Gbps, twice the capacity of the earlier v1.0 bus.

The cards supports storage transport means, including internet small computer system interface (iSCSI v1.0) and can be an iSCSI extension for a remote direct memory access host bus adapter, allowing it to be the main computer (initiator) or the storage device (target) to facilitate data transfers between virtual machines and manage storage over long distances.