SCIENCE

Chelsio Communications has announced availability of its fourth generation Terminator 4 technology in the first release of a new family of 10Gb Ethernet adapter cards.  The T4 cards are the industry's first Ethernet converged network adapters capable of simultaneously offloading all the major networking and storage protocols (TCP, UDP, iWARP, iSCSI, and FCoE) with Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV).

Ideal for all data, storage and high performance clustering applications, the T4 enables a unified fabric over a single wire by simultaneously running all unmodified IP sockets, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand applications over Ethernet at line rate.  Designed for deployment in virtualized data centers, cloud service installations and high performance computing environments, these Chelsio adapters bring a new level of performance metrics and functional capabilities to the networking space.

"Chelsio's T4 technology is a feature rich solution, delivering outstanding performance while supporting a wide range of protocols," said Bill Mannel, vice president of product marketing for SGI.  "The massive growth in cloud services, HPC and data centers is driving the need to maximize equipment densities and minimize power consumption, and Chelsio's T4 adapters are well suited to deliver on the increasing demand for network convergence."

Chelsio is announcing seven new adapters based on the T4 ASIC, and additional cards will be rolled out next quarter.  All the new adapters announced today have SR-IOV-enabled PCIe x8 Gen2 host interfaces, and are capable of fully offloading TCP, UDP, iWARP, iSCSI, and FCoE, with EVB/VEPA/VNTag (802.1Qbg, 802.1Qbh) and DCB support.  In addition, all the adapters include unique hardware features, such fine granularity time stamping, tracing, filtering, and traffic management (pacing and rate shaping).  Power consumption ranges from 9-14W.   The cards can operate concurrently in full offload as well as in stateless fashion.  

The seven new adapters are:

• T420-CR.  2x10Gb Ethernet, low profile, 32K offloaded connections,  SFP+ connector
• T440-CR.  4x10Gb Ethernet, half size, 32K offloaded connections, SFP+ connector
• T420-BCH.  2x10Gb Ethernet daughter card for IBM BladeCenter H, 32K offloaded connections
• T420-SO-CR.  2x10Gb Ethernet, low profile, 128 offloaded connections, SFP+ connector
• T420-CX.  2x10Gb Ethernet low profile, 32K offloaded connections, CX4 connector
• T422-CR.  2x1Gb and 2x10Gb Ethernet, low profile, 32K offloaded connections, SFP+ and RJ45 connectors
• T404-BT.  4x1Gb Ethernet, low profile, 32K offloaded connections, RJ-45 connector

Targeted at Virtualized Clouds, Data Centers, Storage and HPC Applications

Virtualization is driving large increases in server utilization, which means fewer CPU cycles are available for I/O processing.   Along with the extensive offload capabilities of the T4, the embedded switch enables further performance advantages for virtualized environments, switching traffic from up to 140 virtual and physical ports within the T4 adapter.  The T4 supports PCIe SR-IOV (8 Physical Functions, 128 Virtual Functions) with advanced QoS and traffic management functionality, enabling state-of-the-art virtualization design.  

The T4 adapters are an ideal solution for cloud installations.  In addition to a feature-rich virtualized card, enabling immediate re-tasking of any installation to any application or workload, the T4 adapters also provide a very high IOPs and messaging rate.  This makes the solution especially suited for Web 2.0 and other applications where a stateless adapter with a very high packet and connection setup and teardown rate is required.

Broadening its support for block storage, Chelsio's T4 adds both partial and full offload of the FCoE protocol as well as full iSCSI offload.  In support of FCoE traffic, the T4 adds the Data Center Bridging (DCB) protocol.  The T4 cards enable a new unified storage interface that allows a single, simple SCSI command interface to the host driver, with a unified management interface.  By simultaneously offloading TCP/IP, iSCSI and FCoE, the T4 enables unified NAS/SAN systems that adapt to and grow with end-customer needs.

For HPC cluster applications, T4 reduces RDMA verbs latency from about seven microseconds in the T3 to about three microseconds, providing similar application performance as InfiniBand at a much lower cost.  Chelsio has also added UDP-offload features to T4, delivering three microsecond application-to-application latency for UDP packets.  

The massive new silicon features of T4 enable a slew of middleware possibilities.  Chelsio will initially be introducing a UDP-sockets middleware for low latency applications, followed by several other middleware options later this year.  The feature set also allows customization for adding customer-specific value.

"Our T4 adapters are unmatched in the industry.  They are the most complete Converged Network Adapters and are ideally suited for cloud applications where a multi-purpose adapter is a requirement.  Our customers understand that implementation of a successful iSCSI or iWARP protocol requires a reliable, tested TCP engine and here Chelsio stands alone.  A T4-based solution will future-proof any storage or server platform design, providing maximum interoperability, performance and choice of middleware," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO.  "Meanwhile, our T3 adapters have been one of the most successful Ethernet solutions in the last four years.  We anticipate ongoing success with the T3 and plan to continue the production of these products for many more years."  

Pricing and Availability

All seven adapters are sampling now and will be in volume production this quarter.  US list pricing for the cards begins at $579.