If you still need evidence that open source and open standards have real benefits for the consumer, consider Marc Hamilton's remarks on the Sun Virtual Network Express Module (NEM) that sells for far less than the $4,000 per network switch port that some vendors charge.

Hamilton notes that the price of Sun Virtual NEM is somewhat less than $500 per blade server and that it reduces cabling by 10:1, eliminates management and interoperability problems, and provides wire speed 10GbE performance to each blade.

There's more: Sun's Virtual NEM runs with the latest AMD and Intel based Sun Blade modules running Solaris, Linux, or Windows, as well as with our SSD Flash accelerated UltraSPARC blades and is ready to work with Intel\'s recently announced Nehalem CPUs.

Given that CPU advances like the hardware multi-threading in Sun's 8-core UltraSPARC T2 processor and Intel's 4-core Nehalem processor, along with SSD Flash acceleration that Sun is shipping today on blades, Hamilton is confident that 10GbE will become a common requirement soon for more and more blades.

Additional functionality to be found in the Sun Virtual NEM is its ability to connect blades to external shared storage, Hamilton points out.

In a second post, Hamilton illustrates the Virtual NEM's 10GbE capabilities with a block diagram. He writes that "The Virtual NEM can be connected externally to one or two 10 GbE network switch ports. These external 10 GbE links are then shared by up to 10 blades using virtual NICs. When using a single 10 GbE connection, the Inter ASIC Link (IAL) connects the two halves of the virtual NIC. When using two 10 GbE connections, the Virtual NEM can be configured so that each set of 5 blades shares one of the 10 GbE connections, providing a total of 20 Gb of bandwidth. The IAL also supports dynamic failover so that if one of your two 10 GbE connection fails, the Virtual NIC will automatically switch over the 5 blades on the failed connection to the other half of the Virtual NIC. This makes it quite simple to build highly available networks by connecting the Virtual NEM to two separate external switches."

Responding to a comment, Hamilton points out that the Virtual NEM provides a dedicated 1 GigE port to each blade in addition to the 10 GbE ports. A blade can use both at the same time. He also notes that, currently, the Virtual NEM only supports SAS external connectivity from compute blades to Sun Blade 6000 storage blade.

Hamilton also discusses the ASICs in the Sun Virtual NEM and writes about how the 10GbE multithreading works, discussing both RX unicast traffic and blade TX.

Concluding his posts, Hamilton writes that the Sun Virtual NEM is an amazing collection of hardware and a great example of the value of a systems company to be able to integrate its software (OS), compute, storage, and networking assets to solve complex customer problems, all while being open and usable with third party OSes, network switches, or storage.

More Information

Sun Blade 6000 Virtualized Multi-Fabric 10GbE Network Express Module product page

New NEM for the Blade 6000 Series a post by Joerg Moellenkamp [...read more...]

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