BLADE Network Technologies, the data center Ethernet switching company, Solarflare Communications, the leading provider of 10GbE silicon, and Cloudsoft Corporation, a provider of cloud computing software and services that drive application mobility, announced today the results of multivendor benchmarking of Monterey, Cloudsoft’s enterprise-class cloud platform. The benchmark showed that the 10 Gigabit Ethernet test environment achieved consistently low network latency of just 26 microseconds between Virtual Machines (VMs) communicating on different hosts. The testing demonstrates that near-native performance is now possible with applications running in a highly virtualized cloud computing environment.

The combination of BLADE’s RackSwitch G8124 10GbE switch, Solarflare’s SolarStorm SFN4112F 10GbE NIC and Citrix XenServer server virtualization software achieved 18.5 Gbps bi-directional network throughput with four VMs on one host communicating with four VMs on a second host over a single 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection. This represents the top VM communication performance achieved to-date using a state-of-the-art networking and virtualization environment.

The Monterey benchmark was achieved using EzBrokerage, an electronic trading application that demonstrates the value of Monterey in a financial markets context. EzBrokerage was implemented using Cloudsoft’s middleware platform deployed on an enterprise-class cloud infrastructure. The exceptionally consistent low latency achieved under high load is the result of extensive integration efforts by BLADE, Solarflare, Citrix and Cloudsoft.

The benchmark results validate the use of cloud computing and server virtualization for latency-sensitive applications, such as high-frequency trading and market data systems.

“Enterprises seeking to adopt cloud computing and virtualization for critical business applications can gain a significant performance advantage with 10 Gigabit Ethernet,” said Dan Tuchler, vice president of Strategy and Product Management, BLADE Network Technologies. “The Monterey benchmark shows that putting speed and intelligence at the edge of the network enables cloud computing and server virtualization environments to perform on par with physical servers.”

“This benchmark is further validation that the Monterey stack consistently meets the industry’s vital low-latency requirements without customization – even under heavy loads and large subnet sizes,” said Duncan Johnston-Watt, founder and CEO, Cloudsoft Corporation.

“IT and data center managers want to use virtualization to increase server resource utilization, flexibility, and manageability, but have been frustrated by the experience of degradation in network performance when running guest applications,” said Bruce Tolley, vice president of Solutions Marketing, Solarflare Communications. “We’re very pleased the test results demonstrate that customers can get near-native network performance and application latency with Solarflare 10GbE network adapters with virtualized applications and cloud middleware.”

The test configuration consisted of the following elements provided by Monterey partners:

• Super Micro 2U Twin
• Intel Xeon X5570 Processors
• Citrix XenServer 5.5 software/OS
• Solarfare SolarStorm SFN4112F 10GbE NICs
• BLADE RackSwitch G8124 10GbE switch
• Debian Etch 32-bit Linux OS (standard XenServer ISO image)
• Monterey Middleware software

Cloudsoft’s unique middleware platform simplifies the development and deployment of complex transactional applications in the cloud. Cloudsoft’s patented technology automatically eliminates network and processing bottlenecks, optimizes resource management and implements policies, such as follow-the-sun to minimize latency and follow-the-moon to compress costs.

One of the key features of the Monterey platform is support for application mobility, allowing a network path or processing location to be changed while the application is live. Among other benefits of mobility is the ability to scale-up and scale-out as application load changes in real-time.  The network environment can be further enhanced for security, performance and access with BLADE’s unique VMready, virtualization-aware networking that automatically moves network policies as Virtual Machines move.

“These tests make it clear that Monterey can deliver enterprise-class cloud computing today with partners such as BLADE Network Technologies,” said Lou Shipley, group vice president and GM, XenServer Product Group, Citrix Systems. “Citrix has enabled cloud providers to offer a rich portfolio of enterprise services leveraging XenServer and the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) at no charge – and these new tests provide further validation on the efficiency of leveraging Citrix technology in cloud platforms.”