Advancing Network Packet Management for Converged NIC

In a data center, with the advent of Virtualization and Virtual Ethernet Bridging, the server to network edge is becoming an increasingly important area of the infrastructure. The most common types of networks used in enterprise Data Centers are Ethernet for LAN and FC for SAN and are converging. Fiber Channel is a lightweight, high performance protocol usually with in a SAN, where as iSCSI running over traditional TCP-IP protocols and existing Ethernet Infrastructure. These have different topologies, administrators, security, and performance requirements. Challenges from VMs include the performance loss and management complexity of integrating software based virtual switches, also referred to as Virtual Ethernet Bridges (VEB).This white paper will focus on a proposed solution to a part of the problem.