The Company’s Application-Intelligent SR-IOV Solution Accelerates Virtualized Applications While Maintaining Full Support of Hypervisor Features

Solarflare, the leader in application-intelligent 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) networking hardware and software, announced today that it is shipping one of the only 10GbE server adapters in the industry that supports the enhanced SR-IOV (single root I/O virtualization) features found in Citrix XenServer® 6. Solarflare’s SR-IOV solution for XenServer enables customers to deploy virtualized applications with enhanced performance, while maintaining access to the flexibility and feature richness of the hypervisor.

Solarflare’s unique SR-IOV solution offers IT and data center managers the ability to accelerate virtualized network I/O performance, while maintaining access to the flexibility and feature richness of the XenServer hypervisor. Solarflare has worked with Citrix to develop a unique hybrid approach to SR-IOV that delivers unprecedented cut-through performance. As a result, servers that use XenServer for virtualization and Solarflare’s 10GbE adapters will get both accelerated network performance and hypervisor services and management functions, such as virtual machine motion, clustering, high availability and VLANs.

Recently released to the public, Citrix XenServer 6 offers numerous new features, including improved scalability and certification with the SR-IOV Test Kits. In addition, it offers SR-IOV with XenMotion support with Solarflare’s SR-IOV adapters to deliver optimal virtualized network performance. Solarflare’s unique plug-in implementation model provides a flexible, direct path for accelerating applications, which maintain seamless access to critical hypervisor functions, such as virtual machine (VM) migration, VLANs, high availability and fail-over, and VM management.

“This announcement furthers Solarflare’s innovation of advanced virtualization features and accelerated network I/O for XenServer,” said Sameer Dholakia, Group Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix. “They have worked with us closely to ensure the Solarflare SR-IOV adapters support SR-IOV features in XenServer 6 such as XenMotion.”

Solarflare supports more virtual network interfaces (vNICs) and PCIe virtual functions (VFs) than any other solution on the market. Its multiple vNICs can be exposed through a single virtual function to a guest virtual machine or guest application. This allows a guest VM to have multiple transmit and receive queues. When implemented in a XenServer environment that is aware SR-IOV VFs are virtual and not hardware PCIe devices, each guest operating system is also SR-IOV aware, allowing the physical and virtual functions to be properly detected and initialized. In addition, Solarflare’s unique smart flow management features, including flow affinity, support the intelligent allocation of network traffic across these multiple guests to help scale performance over the available server CPU cores, enabling unsurpassed core-scaling capabilities.

Solarflare’s OpenOnload® application acceleration middleware also leverages the scalable vNIC platform to deliver improved performance. Solarflare’s adapters support all major virtual operating systems, including VMware, Xen, Citrix XenServer 5.x and Microsoft Hyper V, and now specifically includes SR-IOV support for Redhat Enterprise Linux KVM and Citrix XenServer 6.

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Pricing and availability
SR-IOV support for Citrix XenServer 6 is currently available. For pricing, contact sales@solarflare.com

About Solarflare
Solarflare is the leading provider of application-intelligent networking I/O products that bridge the gap between applications and the network, delivering improved performance, increased scalability, and higher return on investment. The company’s solutions are widely used in scale-out server environments such as high frequency trading, high performance computing, cloud, virtualization and big data. Solarflare’s products are available from leading distributors and value-added resellers, as well as from Dell, IBM, and HP. Solarflare is headquartered in Irvine, California and has an R&D site in Cambridge, UK.