I/O Acceleration Technology

The Intel I / O Acceleration Technology ( Intel I / OAT ) is a technological development to speed up the input and output (I / O), with the new servers are equipped to use a Xeon dual-core processor from Intel. It involves a change of hardware architecture, are taken from the network controller and the chipset at the parts of the processing of network protocol, which offloads the main processor. For servers that contain I / OAT Intel Gigabit LAN interfaces have to be integrated on the mainboard. The architecture is the conversion of Gigabit Ethernet ( GbE) on 10 Gigabit Ethernet ( 10GbE). Thus, the performance, scalability, reliability and economy are to be massively increased by the use of Intel I / OAT.

What is Intel I / OAT requires?

Today's network traffic overwhelmed the past few years increasing the I / O performance reserves of the most servers. The ensuing performance gap grows with the progress of network communication and the increasing demands by the transaction processing.

To solve this problem, the Intel I / O Acceleration Technology was introduced in May 2006 with the server platform Bentsley and has since been implemented in all Intel XEON CPUs. First of all I / OAT hardware side was exclusively with Intel's own chipsets and Ethernet cards compatible and capable of running. However, already a few months later, Intel allowed other manufacturers to use the technology under the name " Quick Data " and to optimize it for wide use in many environments as possible. Intel itself has set itself the goal of becoming the present and future traffic meet with I / OAT. In today GbE operation only a maximum of 125 MB of data can be transmitted per second ( in theory).

Operation

Intel chose for I / OAT a holistic platform approach and distributes the process of data processing on the individual components that make up the platform - the processor, the chipset, the network controller and the software. I / OAT increases the data throughput for virtual and real network transfers and reduces the CPU load in some cases considerably. In contrast to previous TOEs (TCP Offload Engines) accepts I / OAT the complete processing of the protocol and the system overhead and memory management.

I / OAT includes, among other things, an integrated and improved DMA engine, which allows for faster data transfer, an optimized and multi-threading -compatible TCP / IP stack with lower overhead and faster reaction times, as well as some other techniques to speed up at the platform level and increase scalability. The framework relieves the processor characterized by numerous tasks in the management of network traffic. The technology scales currently satisfactory up to eight gigabit Ethernet ports.

I / OAT is software- specific operating systems such as Windows Server ( NT kernel 5.2) or Linux ( kernel version 2.6.18 ). Ahead.

The reliability and increased safety I / OAT results partly from the exclusive use of trusted TCP / IP stack under the above operating systems and on the other from the stateless TCP offload used, the decorated LAN functions such as VLAN and Teaming maintains.

This results in less overall risk while lower expenses for IT support.

Benefits

  • Enhanced DMA engine for faster data transfer speeds up to twice the maximum data throughput
  • An optimized TCP stack with up to 40% less CPU overhead allows a faster response of the entire application
  • Acceleration at the platform level through a trouble scaling up to eight Gigabit Ethernet ports
  • Thanks to good platform scalability increases with the performance of the CPU, I / O performance
  • Fewer risks for the IT support through the use of trusted TCP / IP stack of Windows Server 2003 and Linux
  • Conservation equipped LAN functions such as VLAN and teaming through stateless TCP offload
  • I / OAT is a standard feature in Intel Ethernet adapters to allow an extra cost with integrated LAN interfaces and network cards no longer
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