Allied Telesis Enhances Network Interface Card for Virtual Machines

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 22, 2010 - Allied Telesis, a global provider of secure IP/Ethernet switching solutions and an industry leader in the deployment of converged multi-play networks, announced the new 2973T/4 network interface card (NIC) optimized for servers running multiple applications or operating systems on virtual machines. This card combines virtualization with high resiliency, offering more robust application performance across the network.

"Virtualized servers running applications in the \u2018cloud' are critical for the IT market today," said Nick Paredes, Allied Telesis product marketing manager. "Servers require more bandwidth to carry an overload of data faster and a NIC card able to support it. Allied Telesis has created a cost-effective, four-port card that allows for the bandwidth needed. The 2973T/4 enables companies with the option to have one server act as several different virtual servers, leading to a lower overall cost-of-ownership."

Benefits of the 2973T/4 include MSI-x (Message Signaled Interrupt) capability, providing control for multiple network queues, one for each virtual machine. The 2973T/4 is also powerful enough to achieve throughputs of up to 2Gbps per link, allowing the network to effectively run mission-critical applications. Additionally, the 2973T/4 is PCI Express V2.0-compliant (Peripheral Component Interconnect), enabling the computer motherboard to move data at up to twice the capacity of the previous version.

Customers migrating to virtual networks are also implementing new storage solutions. One of the common interfaces for storage is the iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface). The 2973T/4 supports iSCSI v1.0, and can be an iSCSI extension for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) Host Bus Adapter (HBA) for the initiator or target, meaning it can serve as the main computer or storage device.