A customer asks for a network technology that will maximize throughput and minimize latency and CPU utilization across servers using SMB Direct and 10Gb Ethernet. Which technology should you propose?

Question

Options

• ATCP/IP Offload Engine
• BRDMA
• Cvirtual extensible LAN (VXLAN)
• DInfiniBand

• A
  6% (1)
• B
  78% (14)
• C
  6% (1)
• D
  11% (2)

Explanation

RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) is correct because SMB Direct is Microsoft's protocol specifically designed to run over RDMA, enabling data to transfer directly between server memory without CPU involvement - delivering exactly the high throughput, low latency, and minimal CPU utilization the customer needs, all over standard 10GbE via RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet).

Why the distractors are wrong:

• A. TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE): Offloads TCP/IP processing to the NIC, reducing CPU load somewhat, but doesn't provide the near-zero-latency, memory-to-memory transfer that RDMA and SMB Direct are built for.
• C. VXLAN: A network virtualization/tunneling protocol that adds encapsulation overhead, actually increasing latency - the opposite of what's needed.
• D. InfiniBand: Supports RDMA natively, but is a separate physical network technology incompatible with 10Gb Ethernet. The question specifies an existing 10GbE infrastructure, so InfiniBand would require a full hardware replacement rather than optimization.

Memory tip: Think of RDMA as "Reaching Directly into Memory Across the network" - it bypasses the CPU and OS stack entirely, which is precisely why SMB Direct was built on top of it. If you see "SMB Direct + low CPU + low latency" together on an exam, the answer is always RDMA.

No community discussion yet for this question.