Dell recently released a case study about NIC partitioning (NPAR), a method that splits an Ethernet port into four virtual ports and consequently saves PCI Express (PCIe) slots. It also lets admins to provision bandwidth to VMs and software running on them regardless of the OS or hypervisor, thus reducing I/O bottlenecks.

Dell has been collaborating with QLogic in this area. The network latter added NPAR to its VMflex solution, including the  QLogic 3200 Series intelligent Ethernet adapters and 8200 Series converged network adapters, in October. The two technologies supplement each other – VMflex aims to reduce bottlenecks and boost performance by giving the virtual OS direct access to compute resources.

The case study explains some of the advantages of the technology in 10GbE environments, most notably the consolidation of the infrastructure. Companies can use less 10GbE ports than GbE ones, and admins have more flexibility with the provisioning of resources.

“Because NPAR enables hardware consolidation and does not require a proprietary  switch infrastructure, the technology, coupled with PowerEdge blade servers, helps organizations lower total cost of ownership for deploying cloud computing and virtualized environments. And by enabling organizations to transition from Fibre Channel to FCoE or iSCSI over 10GbE, NPAR facilitates the deployment of cost-efficient, flexible networks.”

Avoiding bottlenecks in order to better optimize the deployments and be able to deploy more VMs is one of the main issues companies (and IT administrators too, according to this infographic released by Tintri last month)  notice in the virtualized datacenter. Quite a few vendors are hoping to bank on that, including XIO. Formally known as Xiotech, the company is counting on the success of its non-traditional Hyper ISE storage system. It managed to carry out 60,000 I/O operations per second in a July study by Microsoft.