PCIe Sharing: Breaking the “1 to 1” Model Without Breaking Transparency

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 08:00:00 EDT

In an era where data center managers and administrators are endlessly focused on lowering their TCO (total cost of ownership) while they are measured against the most stringent of service levels – the need has arrived for innovative technology that can address the challenge of scaling out virtualized applications without bankrupting the business. Most data center administrators will agree that the issue of achieving higher performance, scale and virtualized server density is limited by the lack of sufficient I/O and memory, not CPU. Many data center administrators spend valuable time and resources provisioning physical I/O resources directly to a single server. Some have even over-provisioned in fear that they will not be able to sufficiently support and supply the required I/O to meet the service level of the application; for example, providing each server its own dedicated 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) network interface card, a dedicated network switch port, and cable. This practice is common and causes a “static” 1 to 1 relationship between resource and server. One might challenge that this seems counterintuitive, as the de facto best practice in today’s data center to pool and share resources (compute, network, and storage) – via virtualization.

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PCIe Sharing: Breaking the “1 to 1” Model Without Breaking Transparency