Accelerating High Speed Networking with Intel I/O Acceleration Technology

White Paper Accelerating High-Speed Networking with Intel® I/O Acceleration Technology
Until recently, the real nature and extent of I/O bottlenecks was not
thoroughly understood. Most network issues could be resolved with
faster servers, higher bandwidth network interface cards (NICs),
and various networking techniques such as network segmentation.
However, the volume of network traffic begun to outpace server
capacity to manage that data. This increase in network traffic is
due to the confluence of a variety of market trends. These
trends include:
• Convergence of data fabrics to Ethernet
• Server consolidation and virtualization, which is increasing server
port densities and maximizing per-port bandwidth requirements
• Clusters and grids—rather than large servers—are becoming the
leading way of creating high-performance computing resources
• Increased adoption of enterprise audio and video resources
(VOIP, video conferencing) and real-time data acquisition are
contributing to network congestion
• Increased adoption of network-attached storage, versus direct-
attach storage, to meet enterprise back-up and recovery needs
• Deployment of high-density blade servers to accommodate
enterprise-computing requirements
The increased reliance on networked data and networked compute
resources results in a need to manage an ever-increasing data
load. This increased load threatens to outpace server-processing
capabilities, as demonstrated by the marginal gains from
traditional performance enhancements (for example, increasing
network bandwidth and adding servers). As a result, IT managers
are now asking, “After investing in a 10X improvement in network
bandwidth, why aren’t we seeing comparable improvements
in application response time and reliability?”
To answer this question, Intel research and development teams
evaluated the entire server architecture to identify the I/O
bottlenecks and determine their nature and impact on network
performance. Out of this investigation came a new technology
called Intel® I/O Acceleration Technology
†
(Intel® I/OAT). This white
paper discusses the platform-wide I/O bottlenecks found through
Intel research and how Intel I/OAT resolves those issues for
accelerating high-speed networking.
2
Introduction
Business success is becoming increasingly dependent on the rapid transfer, processing, compilation, and storage
of data. To improve data transfers to and from applications, IT managers are investing in new networking and
storage infrastructure to achieve higher performance. However, network I/O bottlenecks have emerged as the
key IT challenge in realizing full value from server investments.