NEC announced the development of technology that improves communication efficiency of virtualized servers that accommodate virtual machines.
NEC’s OpenFlow defines “flow” as a unit of communication in a network. By controlling communication in flow granularity, OpenFlow enables fine-grained routing and quality control.
OpenFlow is a new generation networking technology that enables control of IT and networking by separating network control processes from switches to control servers and flexibly implementing them in software.
This newly developed technology is provided as software that directs flow to the most appropriate virtual machines on a virtual server by using Solarflare SFN5122F Dual-Port SFP+ 10 Gigabit Ethernet server adapters that support communications in flow granularity.
This technology improves communication efficiency by more than 10 times by improving throughput by more than 3 times (at least 10 Gbps), and by improving CPU utilization by approximately one third when compared with current communication methods using 10GbE server adapters that do not support communications in flow granularity.
Until now, all communications were forwarded by software on servers, which made acceleration difficult.
This new technology accelerates communications by using “cut-through,” a technique for switching VM communication paths from the software forwarding path to a direct access path between VMs and NICs, and eliminating the software forwarding process when possible.