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Is There a Place for a $500 Ethernet Card?

Posted by timothy on from the yowza dept.

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.'"

9 of 423 comments (clear)

  1. Is There a Place for a $500 Ethernet Card? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yes, there is a place for a $500 ethernet card, far, far away from this guy.

  2. A look into the past by bananahead · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This sounds very similar to the 'smart card' concept back in the late 80's and early 90's. Intel had the 586-driven smart-cards, and I believe 3Com had them as well. They were intended to offload the CPU by putting parts of the stack on the card. They failed because the performance gain and CPU offload numbers were never enough to justify the price difference.

    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.
    1. Re:A look into the past by bluelip · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I've noticed a slowdown in computer response when using gig cards and moving lotsa' data. I thought the bottleneck may have moved to the file systems. Didn't seem to be the case as pumping dummy data throught the nic also caused issues.

      I didn't pursue it far enough to see where where the actual problem was. These cards may help, but my money is on a faster cpu.

      --

      Yep, I never spell check.
      More incorrect spellings can be found he
    2. Re:A look into the past by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Plain old 32-bit PCI has a bandwidth of 32 bits * 33 MHz = 1.056 Gbps. A 64-bit bus would obviously be twice that. Unless there is a lot of other traffic on the PCI bus, I suspect the limitation is the driver, not the bus.

      Peripherals like that built into the motherboard are generally on a PCI bus segment anyway. You can see by looking at the device manager in Windows or by using lspci in Linux. In both cases you will see a vendor ID, bus number, and slot number.

    3. Re:A look into the past by Eivind · · Score: 5, Informative
      Smart cards do more than just offload the CPU from handling TCP data. They offload the PCI bus from handling interrupts. Every packet of data triggers an interrupt.

      With newer Linux-kernels this is quite simply not the case.

      To avoid the torrent of interupts from a fast nic the Linux-kernel detects that the card gets packets so often that essentially there's "always" one or more packets waiting in the cards buffers.

      It responds to this condition by disabling interupts for the card in question and switch to polling it regularily.

      Normally polling is inefficient, because it amounts to asking over and over again "got anything for me now?", where in most situations the answer is "no" 99.99% of the time, which makes it a waste of resources to ask in the first place.

      This changes when the answer is "yes" basically all the time. There's no need for the network card to tell the cpu over and over and over "I got a packet for you", instead the cpu collects packets regularily.

      It's sorta like having your lawyer receive legal letters for you.

      If you get very few, it'd be a waste for you to drop by him every day and ask if he's gotten any for you (polling) most of the days you'd be making the trip for naught. In this situation interupts (i.e. having your lawyer call you and inform you on the rare occasions when a letter *does* arrive) makes more sense.

      But if your letter-flow increases to the point where there's normally 3-5 letters every day and it's rare that no letter arrives, then it no longer makes sense that the lawyer calls you every day to tell you you got letters (interupts), you already assumed that. In this scenario it makes more sense for you to come by regularily and pick up letters without being prompted to do so. (polling)

      Thus, the flow of interupts from a Gb-nic being flooded with 100byte small-packets (say a loaded dns-server) is not 1 million interupts every second -- it is zero interupts.

      (allthough what you write is correct for kernels older than 2.6.10 and for less clever OSes.)

  3. Sure there's a place for them by grub · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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,
  4. I think there is definately a market for this... by Famanoran · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:What good is such a fast Ethernet card... by ScentCone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  6. Um, no. by holysin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...