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Is There a Place for a $500 Ethernet Card?
prostoalex writes "ComputerWorld magazine runs a story on Level 5 Networks, which emerged from the stealth startup status with its own brand of network cards and software called EtherFabric. The company claims they are reducing the load on the servers CPUs and improve the communications between the servers. And it's not vaporware: 'The EtherFabric software shipping Monday runs on the Linux kernel 2.4 and 2.6, with support for Windows and Unix coming in the first half of next year. High volume pricing is $295 for a two-port, 1GB-per-port EtherFabric network interface card and software, while low volume quantities start from $495.'"
Yes, there is a place for a $500 ethernet card, far, far away from this guy.
I wonder what has changed? I have never known the CPU to get dragged down by network traffic, but maybe in the network server markets it is different, However with the Ethernet chipsets being designed into the motherboard and integrated into the tight circle of RAM and CPU, it isn't clear there is a need for this.
How long before the network control is put into the CPU? It is going to be tough to beat that type of performance.
A most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a bit.
Is There a Place for a $500 Ethernet Card?
Of course there is, assuming the card performs as advertised. Sheer conjecture: the card likely has a lot of the smarts onboard. Maybe it has some of the TCP and IP stuff on board too (checksum, etc). Compare that to a crapbox $10.95 RealTek[a] card which generates interrupts like mad because it has no smarts and you'd probably be very suprised. (Think of comparing a decent hardware modem to a software based WinModem.)
[a] I had a sales-drone at Computer Boulevard here in Winnipeg just RAVE about RealTek cards. I said I really wanted 3 Intel or 3COM cards for a new work proxy server and he said 'Why? RealTeks are way cheaper and run at the same speed!' Retard.
Trolling is a art,
I give Realtek 6 months tops to make thier own knock-off of the card for $24.95.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
But not necessarily where the vendors think it is.
Back when I was working at a startup developing anti-DDoS technology, one of the biggest problems we were faced when implemented GigE, was the load on the PCI bus. (This was before we started using PCI-X).
It depends on exactly how customisable the network card software is, but if you could plonk a couple of those into whatever system you wanted - and if the cards themselves could do, say, signature detection of various flood types, or basic analysis of traffic trends then that is a very definite market.
I realise the core issue is not addressed (if your physical pipe is full, then you're fucked), but it takes the load of dropping the malicious packets off the host CPU so it can attempt to service whatever valid traffic actually gets through.
And then there is IP fragmentation. Bad fragments? Perhaps a dodgy fragmentation implementation in the stack? (you know which OS I mean) Lets just drop that before the host sees it and crashes.
I don't know, I can't find any real information describing what they do, but I can certainly see uses for this.
if your internet connection is anything less than fiber, which is about 99.9% of all connections? Not to mention the fact that not many computers can actually handle that much data at once anyway
Listen, when I've got 30 web servers banging away on a single database server, I want each web server in and out as quickly as possible. Every bit of the handshake, query, and results is going to wrap up that much faster if things are faster, period. When you're dealing with a huge data-driven e-commerce site, where every page renders around a hundred or more queries, and there are dozens or hundreds of concurrent page views, this stuff really counts in the aggregate.
If you sell one more widget per day, all year long, because your web presentation layer is just a little more snappy, that's sure as hell going to pay for a $500 NIC.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The name Level 5 refers to the network protocol stack where level 5 delivers data from the network to the application, according to Karr. The company isn't concerned about any potential confusion with Internet Protocol telecom Level 3 Communications Inc. On the contrary, he quipped, "It's working in our favor. People say, 'Yes, we've heard of you. You're a big company.'"
As lawyers at Level 3 begin salivating at thought of all of the potential lawsuits.
We use Filers for storage at Gigabit speeds. Compared to our SAN/FC evironments, we see much higher CPU utilisation on our Sol 8 boxes, especially when attempting to get to Gigibit speeds.
Each page renders a hundred or more queries? Sounds like you're better off investing in a better design than better hardware.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
You're probably thinking of the i960-based cards, though Intel's PRO series adapters (not i960 based) do something similar (TCP checksumming is now builtin to the chipset and most OS drivers now know how to take advantage of that). That processor, and variants, were used in everything from network cards to RAID controllers.
They failed because the performance gain and CPU offload numbers were never enough to justify the price difference.
Ding ding ding. I forget who said it (maybe Alan Cox, but I'm REALLY not sure about that), but the opinion was along the lines that it would always be more benefitial to throw the money at a faster processor (or a second processor etc), because you'd get a performance boost everywhere. $300 buys quite a bit extra CPU horsepower these days, and there's no need for the hassles of custom drivers and such. Nowadays CPUs are just so damn fast, it's also not really necessary.
Please help metamoderate.
If you have a machine (say on a machine running linux kernel 2.4.20-30.9smp) with a built in gig port (say with eth0 identified as eth0: Tigon3 [partno(BCM95704A6) rev 2003 PHY(5704)] (PCI:66MHz:64-bit) 10/100/1000BaseT) connected to a decent gigabit switch, and another machine (same card, same os)with a gigabit card, those two machines will achieve 940Mbps talking to each other (results via iperf, 0.0-10.0 sec 1.09 GBytes 940 Mbits/sec).
However, if you plug a windows box (2000 or xp, didn't have a 2003 handy) with either an add on card, OR built in gig (2000 vs xp) you get a rather less impressive figure of 550-630. Coincidentally, you'll get the same basic number if you run two instances of iperf on the same computer... This tells me the bottleneck isn't the PCI bus, it's the OS. If you can prove me wrong please do so...
Accelerating Ethernet in hardware, while remaining 100% compatible with the standard protocols on the wire, isn't all that new. Just over 2 years ago, I worked on a TOE (TCP offload engine) card at Adaptec.
l ymatrix.html?cat=%2fTechnology%2fNAC+Cards%2fNAC+C ards
http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/prodfami
It was a complete TCP stack in hardware (with the exception of startup/teardown, which still was intentionally done in software, for purposes of security/accounting).
Once the TCP connection was established, the packets were completely handled in hardware, and the resulting TCP payload data was DMA'ed directly to the application's memory when a read request was made. Same thing in the other direction, for a write request. Very fast!
I'm not sure of the exact numbers but we reduced CPU utilization to around 10%-20% of what it was under a non-accelerated card, and were able to saturate the wire in both directions using only a 1.0Ghz CPU. This is something that was difficult to do, given the common rule of thumb that you need 1Mhz of CPU speed to handle every 1Mbit of data on the wire.
To make a long story short, it didn't sell, and I (among many others) was laid off.
The reason was mostly about price/performance: who would pay that much for just a gigabit ethernet card? The money that was spent on a TOE-accelerated network card would be better spent on a faster CPU in general, or a more specialized interconnect such as InfiniBand.
When 10Gb Ethernet becomes a reality, we will once again need TOE-accelerated network cards (since there are no 10GHz CPU's today, as we seem to have hit a wall at around 4Ghz). I'd keep my eye on Chelsio: of the Ethernet TOE vendors still standing, they seem to have a good product.
BTW, did you know that 10Gb Ethernet is basically "InfiniBand lite"? Take InfiniBand, drop the special upper-layer protocols so that it's just raw packets on the wire, treat that with the same semantics as Ethernet, and you have 10GbE. I can predict that Ethernet and InfiniBand will conceptually merge, sometime in the future. Maybe Ethernet will become a subset of InfiniBand, like SATA is a subset of SAS....
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