At the HPC Linux for Wall Street conference today in NYC, Chelsio demonstrated a user mode UDP latency of 1.6usec and user mode TCP latency of 2.0usec using its WireDirect software suite, both numbers representing industry record performance.  Chelsio WireDirect provides direct network access to user space and is binary compatible with existing TCP and UDP sockets applications.  User mode UDP showed 3 million messages/second with excellent jitter profile and no dropped packets.  User mode TCP similarly demonstrated 2.3 million messages/second with nearly zero packet jitter thanks to the use of T5’s offload engine. These preliminary results are expected to improve before general availability.

Chelsio adapters also offer the industry’s lowest latency RDMA over Ethernet (iWARP) at 1.6usec user-space to user-space, with true kernel bypass, zero copy, and processing fully offloaded to the server adapter resulting in very low CPU utilization. Furthermore, T5 RDMA demonstrates an unprecedented 6.2 million messages/sec with excellent jitter characteristics. Chelsio’s solution is integrated within the standard Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) and supports the full RDMA verbs interface.  By using TCP/IP as a transport, iWARP RDMA benefits from unlimited scaling, routing capability, reliability, and interoperability. It is the simplest RDMA over Ethernet to deploy and does not impose requirements for DCB support.  Further performance improvements are expected before general availability.

“Low Latency is a key driver of the10Gb Ethernet market, and we expect that it will be even more important as we move to 40Gb Ethernet and then 100Gb Ethernet.  Vendors that can differentiate themselves by offering the lowest latency options for a wide range of applications in a single solution should see considerable success in this space,” said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research.

“T5’s forward software compatibility will enable the users to leverage all software investment, as they enjoy today’s superior performance” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO of Chelsio.  “Combined with Chelsio’s recent demonstration of 40Gb iSCSI and Microsoft SMB 3.0 over iWARP RDMA, T5 provides an ideal all-in-one solution, enabling server and storage OEMs to converge on a single vendor and realize the economies of scale for all verticals, using the same hardware solution.”

Final software will be available later in Q2.  The complete report is available on the Chelsio website.

About Chelsio Communications, Inc.

Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments.  Now shipping its fourth generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is delivering hardware and software solutions including Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions focused on specialized applications.  Visit the company at www.chelsio.com.

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The USS software is on display this week at Storage Networking World Spring in Orlando, with a demonstration of the new caching engine capability in action, increasing iSCSI IOPs by an order of magnitude.

The new and enhanced features of USS 3.0 include:

• RAM caching and SSD caching
• Performance enhancements in Thin Provisioning
• Support for Lustre file system in HA mode
• iSCSI boot DHCP Server support

“The Chelsio Unified Storage Server software enables impressive storage performance of over 2 million IOPs at a very economical price point, which should provide significant traction for the continued growth of iSCSI-based storage,” said Saqib Jang, principal and founder, Margalla Communications.  “This is an ideal solution for resellers and integrators looking to build powerful and low-cost storage configurations.”

Chelsio USS Software

Some features of USS include:

• Ease-of-Use: Use the Web-based GUI, Local GUI, or CLI to configure and deploy block and file storage. This also includes the ability to easily configure the supported RAID cards right from within USS.  The product also supports off the shelf Fibre Channel adapters.
• Low TCO: USS provides some of the lowest cost per Gigabyte solutions in the industry.  Users can add storage to the solution with no additional software licenses.
• Chelsio T4 Technology: USS uses Chelsio’s Unified Wire technology to provide unsurpassed off-load capabilities that provide some of the highest performance in the industry.
• Mission Critical: Chelsio USS provides for Highly Available configurations as well as replication and snapshots.

The beta version of USS 3.0 is available today, with general availability later this quarter.

About Chelsio Communications, Inc.

Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments.  Now shipping its fourth generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is delivering hardware and software solutions including Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions focused on specialized applications.  Visit the company at www.chelsio.com.

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The demonstration at the Orlando conference marks the debut of Chelsio’s 40G storage technology, heralding a new era for iSCSI SAN deployments beyond the SMB space, and providing a crucial performance edge in a time of ever increasing storage demands.   This demo will showcase the highest bandwidth, lowest latency and most scalable SAN solution in the industry – better in every performance metric than the best Fibre Channel solution, establishing a lead that will only increase with the arrival of 100G Ethernet.  These performance advantages will all be available on the ubiquitous standard Ethernet technology, without the need for Data Center Bridging switches.  Running over the routable, robust and proven TCP/IP foundation, iSCSI SAN architectures further enjoy unconstrained scalability.

Chelsio’s iSCSI offload solution is a proven fourth generation design that has been further hardened by the integration of T10-DIX end-to-end support, extending crucial data protection across the entire storage subsystem.

With the emergence of Solid State Storage (SSD) and the rise in 10G Ethernet server connectivity, there is exceptional demand placed on the offload capabilities, transaction latency, and bandwidth and IOPs capacity of the storage adapter to improve efficiency, and to deliver higher performance, particularly at the storage aggregation points.  A high performance iSCSI solution, combined with T10-DIX enhanced data integrity – available in silicon for the first time – is key to unlocking the potential of high performance storage systems and delivering the value proposition to the end user.  Furthermore, iSCSI is part of Chelsio’s unified wire solution, comprising in addition 40Gb TCP/IP, UDP/IP, Video, RDMA and FCoE offload capabilities, which make a T5-based solution the ideal choice for any high performance storage application.

“The next generation 40G iSCSI storage technology is here, and that is exciting news for enterprise data center, cloud and Big Data customers requiring high performance SAN-based storage,” said Saqib Jang, principal and founder, Margalla Communications.  “Chelsio’s demonstration shows that iSCSI scales to 40G speeds while preserving the simplicity, reliability and scalability advantages it enjoys.  Chelsio has shown that iSCSI is no longer confined to the SMB space and is indeed one of the highest performance, and highest data integrity enterprise SAN solutions available today.”

The Orlando demonstration consists of an iSCSI target utilizing a T5 adapter with a link speed of 40Gb/s connected to a generic Ethernet switch.  Five iSCSI initiator client systems running MS Windows Server 2012 are also connected to the switch using Chelsio 10Gb T420-CR adapters.  The demo fills the 40G pipe to capacity on the target system using iSCSI traffic from the five initiators.

“The migration from spindles to SSD that is currently underway and the associated need for increased bandwidth aligns perfectly with the arrival on the scene of 40Gb iSCSI,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio. “The storage performance is no longer handicapped by the legacy FibreChannel bandwidth, which tops out at 16Gb and with a roadmap that at best will continue to trail Ethernet as Ethernet moves to 100Gb.  Our fifth generation, enterprise grade offload technology combined with our 100Gb roadmap enables storage customers to leverage their software investment into the future while taking advantage of Ethernet’s performance curve and economies of scale.”

About Chelsio Communications, Inc.

 Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments.  Now shipping its fourth generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is delivering hardware and software solutions including Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions focused on specialized applications.  Visit the company at www.chelsio.com.

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This will be the first demonstration of Chelsio’s T5 40G storage technology — a converged interconnect solution that simultaneously supports all of the networking, cluster and storage protocols. Chelsio offers a complete suite of drivers for Windows Server 2012, including NDIS, Network Direct for HPC applications, Network Direct Kernel for system services, iSCSI, FCoE and Hyper-V support for virtualized environments, constituting one of the most comprehensive server adapter solutions that can unleash the full value of a Microsoft Windows Server installation.

The iWARP Ethernet RDMA solution fully offloads the host CPU, resulting in a more efficient data center install in a virtualized environment. SMB-Direct over iWARP RDMA provides higher performance by giving direct access to the data that resides on a remote file server, while the CPU reduction enables a larger number of VMs per server, unlocking CAPEX and OPEX savings in power dissipation, system configuration and deployment scale throughout the life of the installation.

Additionally, Chelsio is announcing the availability of the beta version of the T5 driver for Network Direct for Windows Server 2012.

“Windows Server 2012 provides breakthrough innovations in storage technology,” said Chris Phillips, Partner Director of Program Management, Windows Server and System Center, Microsoft. “Chelsio’s demonstration of line-rate 40G performance with its T5 technology at the SNW Spring conference provides a strong foundation for Windows storage solutions on an Ethernet platform.”

SMB Direct over iWARP RDMA Demonstration

The demonstration at SNW connects Windows Server 2012 systems running as SMB 3.0 clients connecting to another server running as an SMB 3.0 file server, the data being transferred at 40Gb line rate using SMB Direct protocol over iWARP RDMA from the SMB clients to the SMB server.

RDMA over Ethernet (iWARP RDMA)

RDMA over Ethernet (iWARP) is an industry-standard low latency protocol developed by the IETF and supported by the industry’s leading 10Gb/40Gb Ethernet adapters. Since it is built on top of TCP/IP, it is routable and scalable from just a few to thousands of co-located or geographically dispersed endpoints and scales to any data center topology or speed. It further can work independently of the DCBX protocol, thereby decoupling the server and switch refresh cycles.

Chelsio Unified Wire Adapters

Ideal for all data, storage and high performance clustering applications, Chelsio Unified Wire adapters enable 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.

About Chelsio Communications, Inc.

Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments. Now shipping its fourth generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is delivering hardware and software solutions including Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions focused on specialized applications. Visit the company at www.chelsio.com.

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SUNNYVALE, CA – January 22, 2013 – Chelsio Communications, Inc., a leading provider of Ethernet Unified Wire Adapters and ASICs, today announced Terminator 5, the fifth generation of its high performance Ethernet silicon technology.  The Terminator 5 (T5) ASIC is built upon the latest iteration of Chelsio’s protocol-rich high speed network processing architecture, and leverages an industry-proven design, which has been widely deployed with more than 200 OEM platform wins and more than 400,000 ports shipped worldwide. Launching two years after the T4 ASIC, the T5 moves the architecture into 40GbE speeds, and prepares the transition to 100GbE expected by 2015.

T5 is a highly integrated, hyper-virtualized 10/40GbE controller with full offload support of a complete Unified Wire solution comprising NIC, TOE, iWARP RDMA, iSCSI, FCoE and NAT.   T5 provides no-compromise performance with both low latency (sub 1usec through hardware) and high bandwidth, limited only by the PCI bus. Furthermore, it scales to true 40 Gigabit line rate operation from a single TCP connection to thousands of connections, and allows simultaneous low latency and high bandwidth operation thanks to multiple physical channels through the ASIC.

Designed for high performance clustering, storage and data networking, the T5 enables fabric consolidation by simultaneously supporting TCP/IP and UDP/IP socket applications, RDMA applications and SCSI applications at wire speed, thereby allowing InfiniBand and FibreChannel applications to run unmodified and concurrently over standard Ethernet.  This will result in tremendous savings in the data center by avoiding the need for InfiniBand or FibreChannel adapters, cabling, switches and gateways.  The API used for the complete software suite (Linux, Windows and FBSD) in current T4 installations is the same for the T5 chip and upcoming 100Gb capable versions, leveraging all the software investment made in T4 deployments.

T5 establishes a new milestone for SAN performance, finally moving past FC performance.  With T5, true 40Gb SAN throughput, more than 3x the latest FC speeds, is now enabled via offloaded iSCSI without waiting for specialized FCoE switches.  T5 is further expected to improve storage IO performance from the current record of 2.1M IOPS held by the T4 silicon.

T5 also establishes a new milestone for Ethernet clustering performance.  While recent comparisons of IB-FDR and T4 iWARP RDMA show the two at parity (LAMMPS, LS-DYNA, HPL and WRF on iWARP vs InfiniBand FDR) with half the latency and 4x the bandwidth of T4, T5 is expected to exceed IB-FDR performance.  Thanks to the reliability provided by hardware offloaded TCP/IP, the benefits of T5 RDMA include eliminating the scalability and cabling and noise issues associated with IB-FDR.

With a specific design focus on low latency and small packet processing performance, T5 also enables a new performance milestone for high frequency trading and other latency sensitive applications.

Given the high integration of T5, the ability to concurrently run all the different protocols at industry leading performance levels, and the rich feature set that addresses all of Ethernet’s market segments, this silicon enables OEMs to converge on a single vendor for all their connectivity needs.

The market for 40Gb Ethernet is expected to ramp quickly.  Crehan Research forecasts 40Gb Ethernet server adapters and LOMs will exceed $600 million by 2017.

“The Terminator 5 ASIC is an important evolutionary step for Chelsio, bringing all the offload, virtualization, and switching capabilities of the existing T4 chip to 40Gbps performance levels,” said Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at The Linley Group.  “The arrival of the T5 should accelerate the convergence of networking, storage, and clustering around 40G Ethernet.”

T5 Architectural Features
The T5 ASIC is built around a highly scalable and programmable protocol-processing engine.  Much of the processing of the offloaded protocols is implemented in microcode running on a proprietary pipelined data-flow engine.  The pipeline supports cut-through operation for both transmit and receive paths for minimum latency, and the transport processor is designed for wire-speed operation at small packet sizes, regardless of the number of TCP connections.

Some key features of the T5:

• PCI Express v3.0 x8 host interface
• 2xDDR-3 memory interfaces
• 4x100M/1G/10G or 2x40G Ethernet ports
• Designed for very low latency, high bandwidth and high packet processing rate
• NIC/TOE/iWARP RDMA/iSCSI/FCoE/NAT offload
• TOE/iWARP RDMA/iSCSI/FCoE port to port, and adapter to adapter failover
• SR-IOV 8PF/128VF + VEPA/VEB 802.1Qbg/h offload virtualization
• Integrated OpenFlow ready virtual Ethernet switch
• T10-DIF/DIX protection support for both FCoE and iSCSI

Availability and Pricing
The T5 is designed in 45nm SOI CMOS process technology and packaged in a 31x31mm, 899-pin FCBGA.  Customer samples are available in Q1 and volume quantities in Q2.  Driver development and reference design kits are available now.

About Chelsio Communications
Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments.  With its fifth generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is enabling hardware and software solutions including Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions focused on specialized applications.  Visit the company at www.chelsio.com.

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The Terminator 5 (T5) is Chelsio’s fifth generation ASIC.   A highly integrated, hyper-virtualized 10/40GbE controller, the T5 is built around a programmable protocol-processing engine, with full offload of a complete Unified Wire solution comprising NIC, TOE, iWARP RDMA, ISCSI, FCoE and NAT support.  The  T5 provides no-compromise performance with both low latency (1usec through hardware) and high bandwidth, limited only by the PCI bus. Furthermore, it scales true 40Gb line rate operation from a single TCP connection to thousands of connections, and allows simultaneous low latency and high bandwidth operation thanks to multiple physical channels through the ASIC.

Designed for high performance clustering, storage and data networks, the T5 enables fabric consolidation by simultaneously supporting wire-speed TCP/IP and UDP/IP socket applications, RDMA applications and SCSI applications, thereby allowing InfiniBand and FibreChannel applications to run unmodified over standard Ethernet.  The API used for the complete software suite (on Linux, Windows and FSBD) for current T4 installations is the same for the T5 chip and future 100Gb capable versions, leveraging all the software investment that has been made in T4 deployments.

Chelsio T5 ASIC Architecture

The T5 ASIC is built around a highly scalable and programmable protocol-processing engine.  Much of the processing of the offloaded protocols is implemented in microcode running on a pipelined proprietary data-flow engine.  The pipeline supports cut-through operation for both transmit and receive paths for minimum latency.  The transport processor is designed for wire-speed operation at small packet sizes, regardless of the number of TCP connections.

Some key features of the T5:

• Integrated PCI Express v3.0 x8 host interface
• 2xDDR-3 memory interfaces
• 4x100M/1G/10G or 2x40G ports
• Designed for very low latency, highbandwidth and high packet processing rate
• NIC/TOE/iWARP RDMA/iSCSI/FCoE/NAT offload
• TOE/iWARP RDMA/iSCSI/FCoE port to port, and adapter to adapter failover
• SR-IOV 8PF/128VF + VEPA/VEB 802.1Qbg/h offload virtualization
• Integrated OpenFlow ready virtual Ethernet switch
• T10-DIF/DIX protection support for both FCoE and iSCSI

Related Links:

T5 Architecture White Paper

T5 Product Brief

Download Software Drivers

Unified Wire API (Unified Wire v2.3) is available now as a free download from the Chelsio website.  In this latest release, previously standalone management software (Unified Manager) and vertical application software (WireDirect™, StreamEngine™) are bundled in.

By standardizing its Terminator ASIC API, Chelsio enables customers to leverage their existing software investment on the T4 silicon for future 40Gb, 100Gb speeds, and beyond.  Continuing with the unified wire vision, the standardized API can run unmodified Fibre Channel and InfiniBand applications concurrently over Ethernet, while future protecting all OEM software investments.

Chelsio has an unmatched feature set for its single-chip T4 architecture, and as indicated in numerous Crehan Research reports, it has long established itself as a leading 10Gb Ethernet adapter vendor.  “Delivery of a unified API that is forward compatible with the upcoming 40G and 100G ASICs while bundling management and other value added software at no cost should broaden Chelsio’s market opportunities as storage, clustering and networking converge onto a single unified fabric,”  said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research.

Now bundled with the Unified Wire API

1. Chelsio’s Unified Manager centrally manages all Chelsio network adapter cards on the network across Windows and Linux environments, from a mobile web-based platform.

2. Designed for latency sensitive applications such as financial services, WireDirect technology consists of three main software modules that enable direct wire access for TCP, UDP and raw Ethernet from user space to the Chelsio T4 network adapter with complete bypass of the kernel. The result is a 10Gb Ethernet solution with an ultra-low and deterministic latency perfectly suited for high frequency trading and other delay-sensitive applications.

3. Chelsio StreamEngine (CSE) adds video segmentation offload and per-stream rate shaping functionality to the TCP and UDP offload capabilities of the T4 Unified Wire adapters.  CSE significantly reduces CPU utilization and increases video and content delivery capacity, enabling best-in-class performance for Content Delivery Networks (CDN), IPTV and Video on Demand providers.

4. Chelsio iSCSI and FCoE Initiator stacks are also bundled with the Unified Wire API. Chelsio iSCSI and FCoE Target solutions are available for concurrent operation with the bundle.

Pricing and Availability

The Chelsio Unified Wire API is available today for free as a download from the Chelsio website.

About Chelsio Communications, Inc.

Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments.  Now shipping its fourth generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is delivering hardware and software solutions including Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions focused on specialized applications.  Visit the company at www.chelsio.com.

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The Legacy T3 Adapters Listed Here Are Discontinued

Built to accelerate and smooth media streaming and other high throughput applications, the Chelsio StreamEngine delivers best-in-class performance for Content Delivery Network (CDN), IPTV and Video on Demand (VOD) providers (StreamEngine Product Brief).

“Media service providers are faced with new and pressing challenges such as how to differentiate their media delivery offerings by delivering more personal, social, and interactive media experiences, making media delivery simpler and more intuitive in a video delivery model that is fragmented across devices, screens, and interfaces, and preserving the value of their content while delivering to new screens and platforms,” said Saqib Jang, Principal and Founder, Margalla Communications.  “The Chelsio StreamEngine enables providers to address such challenges while optimizing scalability and return on investment.”

A typical customer installation can do 2,000 streams per dual-socket server by running the protocol in software.  In comparison with StreamEngine, a single T4 adapter can deliver more than 32,000 streams using a single server – enabling a smaller, less costly, lower power solution while delivering much higher performance and capacity.

Video Segmentation Offload

Tailored for video content, the StreamEngine segmentation offload technology moves the processing required to packetize video data and control its transmission rate from the server to the network adapter.  Video Segmentation Offload (VSO) increases performance and dramatically reduces CPU overhead, allowing significantly higher capacity using the same server hardware. Without VSO support, video server software needs to packetize payload into frames, process each frame individually through the network stack and schedule individual frame transmission, resulting in millions of system calls and packet traversal through all protocol layers in the operating system to the network adapter.

In contrast, StreamEngine implements the full network protocol stack in the T4 adapter, and the video server software simply hands off unprocessed video payload in large I/O buffers to the StreamEngine middleware, which handles the rest.  By taking over these CPU intensive tasks from the host server, StreamEngine enables low cost servers to handle tens of thousands of streams.

Rate Shaping

Rate Shaping within the StreamEngine allows Content Delivery Networks/Video On Demand providers to avoid receive buffer overflows, smooth out network traffic, and enforce Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Without dedicated hardware-based rate shaping or limiting support, the video server must perform rate limiting in software, a CPU intensive task that can be prohibitive at 10Gb and higher rates.

StreamEngine implements per-stream rate shaping in the T4 device, offloading the video server software and drastically reducing CPU utilization, while increasing the shaping precision and minimizing the jitter of the frames sent onto the network.  It can shape traffic on a per-packet or per-byte basis for arbitrary flow or class, where a class is a random grouping of either offloaded or non-offloaded flows.

StreamEngine supports up to 16 unique shaping rates or traffic classes per channel (port), and an arbitrary number of video streams can be assigned to each class.  In conjunction with VSO, this enables the video server software to push large amounts of payload to the StreamEngine at a time; StreamEngine then segments and schedules the transmission of the resulting frames onto the network as specified by the associated Traffic Class.

Pricing and Availability

The Chelsio StreamEngine is available at a no cost license for a limited time, as a download from the Chelsio website.  StreamEngine is part of Unified Wire 2.3 release for T4 silicon and adapters.

About Chelsio Communications, Inc.

Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments.  Now shipping its fourth generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is delivering hardware and software solutions including Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions focused on specialized applications.  Visit the company at www.chelsio.com.

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Video Segmentation Offload
Tailored for video content, the StreamEngine Video Segmentation Offload (VSO) technology moves the processing required to packetize video data and rate control its transmission from software running on the host to the network adapter.  VSO increases performance and dramatically reduces CPU overhead, allowing significantly higher capacity using the same server hardware. Without VSO support, video server software running on the host needs to packetize payload into frames, process each frame individually through the network stack and schedule individual frame transmission, resulting in millions of system calls, and packet traversals through all protocol layers in the operating system to the network device. In contrast, StreamEngine implements the network protocol stack in the T4 adapter, and the host server software simply hands off unprocessed video payload in large I/O buffers to the adapter.

The following figure compares the traditional datapath on the left to the StreamEngine datapath on the right, showing how per-frame processing is eliminated. In this example, the video server pushes five frames at a time. In an actual implementation, a video server pushes 50 frames or more in each I/O, drastically lowering the CPU cycles required to deliver the content.

Rate Shaping
Rate shaping or limiting is beneficial for several reasons, one example is for Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)/Video On Demand (VOD) providers to avoid receive buffer overflows, smooth out network traffic, or to enforce Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Without dedicated hardware based rate limiting support, the video server must perform rate limiting in software, which is a CPU intensive task and can be prohibitive at 10Gb and higher rates.

StreamEngine implements per video stream rate limiting in the T4 adapter thereby offloading the traffic shaping that would normally be done by software running on the server. As a result, host CPU utilization and network transmission jitter are drastically reduced.

StreamEngine supports up to 16 unique shaping rates or traffic classes per channel (port), and an arbitrary number of video streams can be assigned to each class. In conjunction with Video Segmentation Offload, the video server software can push large amounts of payload to the StreamEngine at a time, which then segments and schedules the transmission of the resulting frames onto the network as specified by the associated Traffic Class. The result is tremendous improvements in system efficiency, as show in the figure below.

Chelsio’s StreamEngine technology, a combination of hardware, firmware and software components, offloads the CPU intensive tasks from the server to the Chelsio Unified Wire Adapter, freeing up CPU cycles, and allowing the server to be equipped with less expensive, lower power CPUs, and significantly increases the capacity of the content delivery server.

StreamEngine Product Brief

Salt Lake City, Utah – November 13, 2012 – Today at SC12, Gnodal Limited, a systems company delivering industry leading performance, port density and low power to the high-performance data center with GS-Series switches; and Chelsio, a leader in 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) Unified Wire networking adapters, announced industry leading benchmarks of MPI performance using the OSU MPI stack in a test with the Gnodal GS7200 10/40GbE switch and Chelsio T420-LL-CR adapters.

Ultra-low MPI latency is required by many commercial scientific and engineering applications, as well as by many tools used in Research and Academia. Providing such low latency using Ethernet—so far only achieved using proprietary networks—offers the benefit of supporting high-performance computing workloads along with storage and regular traffic within a standards-based converged networking environment. Additional information about the test environment and performance can be found at T4 Benchmark Open MPI OFED iWARP.

“We are observing a trend in HPC as organizations are now able to exploit standards-based Ethernet networks to deliver the superior HPC performance they desire,” said Dr. John Taylor, Gnodal Vice President of Technical Marketing. “This test shows that with the combination of the Chelsio 10GbE Unified Wire server adapter and the scalable Gnodal GS-Series switch family, we are able to provide an industry leading, end-to-end, low-latency solution capable of handling the most demanding HPC applications with the added benefit of reducing the complexity of managing multiple networks.”

“HPC customers are typically focused on attaining the lowest latency possible, and the combination of Gnodal switches and our Unified Wire adapters is a powerful solution that addresses their needs,” said Dr. Wael Noureddine, Vice President of Technology and Product Management, Chelsio. “The T420-LL-CR adapter is proven to provide the lowest 10Gb iWARP latency in the industry, meeting the requirements of the most delay-sensitive applications, including High Performance Computing and High Frequency Trading.”

Chelsio’s T420-LL-CR 10GbE Unified Wire adapters leverage Chelsio’s fourth-generation, high-performance, Transport Offload Engine (TOE) processor core. Chelsio’s ASIC fully implements the complete TCP/IP stack, as well as higher level protocols including iWARP RDMA and iSCSI, thereby offloading protocol-processing costs from the host to the adapter. Transport-offload technology frees up server memory, bandwidth and expensive CPU cycles to improve the performance of useful applications, while preserving the reliability and scalability benefits of the familiar TCP/IP stack.

In addition to testing with 10GbE, Chelsio’s performance projections for 40GbE iWARP herald even more opportunity to transition from specialized fabrics to high-speed Ethernet. This highlights a further benefit of the built-in capabilities of the Gnodal PETA ASIC in supporting native 40GbE within the same platform.   More information about Chelsio’s overall performance benchmarks can be found at http://www.chelsio.com/performance-benchmarks/.

About Chelsio Communications

Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments.  Now shipping its fourth-generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is delivering hardware and software solutions including Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions focused on specialized applications.   For more information about Chelsio, visit booth # 3818 at SC12 or www.chelsio.com.

About Gnodal

The Gnodal® ASIC Ethernet switch architecture features a congestion-aware performance and workload engine that allows for ultra-low latency transmission while utilizing a dynamic, fully adaptive load-balancing mechanism to equitably arbitrate a pre-emptive pathway for large data-sets, high-computational applications and massive storage demands prevalent in HPC and Big Data environments. The 72-port, 40GbE, “fabric-in-a-box” GS0072 solution extends Gnodal’s leadership in port density ToR solutions and won the best-in-class award for networking at Interop 2012 (www.bestofinterop.com/winners/).

Gnodal’s high-performance network fabric delivers industry-leading speed to help reduce latencies. Gnodal’s highest port density 1U and 2U ToR switches are ideally suited for deployment within co-location environments and enterprise data centers. On ingress into GS-Series switching, the initial latency is sub-150 nanoseconds (store/forward) with each subsequent Gnodal switch added to the fabric incurring only 66 nanoseconds of additional latency (cut-through).   For more information about Gnodal, visit booth #4818 at SC12 or www.gnodal.com.

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Built with off-the-shelf hardware and showcasing the Chelsio Unified Wire adapters and Unified Storage Server (USS) software, the demo will show resellers and system integrators how to easily construct a high performance, simple and cost-effective Unified SAN and NAS target solution.  The demo includes five iSCSI initiators (running MS Windows Server 2012) accessing the high performance iSCSI target through a generic 10GbE switch.  The iSCSI target server includes a single Chelsio T4 Unified Wire adapter, four enterprise-class PCIe SSDs from Micron Technology, Inc., and Chelsio’s USS software.   Iometer benchmarking software is used to show the read/write performance of the system.    Chelsio is achieving 2.1 million IOPs to RAMDisk, and 1.7 million IOPs to SSDs.

“Our USS software and offload silicon technology enables an extremely cost-effective, high performance storage target solution,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio.  “Chelsio’s high performance iSCSI silicon enables Ethernet to permanently supplant Fibre Channel and absorb another protocol, using generic TCP/IP and without reinventing a slew of new protocols or requiring an infrastructure forklift upgrade – exactly what the industry needs. We’re continuing to push the price-performance curve and delivering industry-leading solutions for the high performance storage market.”

 Chelsio Unified Storage Server (USS) Software

USS software supports CIFS/SMB, NFS, RDMA, FTP, HTTP, Lustre, iSCSI, FC, Thin Provisioning volumes, Volume cloning, snapshots, instant restore from snapshots, volume encryption, remote replication, compression, shared storage high availability, system monitor and alert, back-ups, and a host of other features.

Some additional features of USS:

• Ease-of-Use: Use the Web-based GUI or CLI Interface to configure and deploy block and file storage. This also includes the ability to easily configure the supported RAID cards right from within USS.
• Low TCO: USS provides some of the lowest cost per Gigabyte solutions in the industry.  Users can add storage to the solution with no additional software licenses.
• Chelsio T4 Technology: USS uses Chelsio’s Unified Wire technology to provide unsurpassed off-load capabilities that provide some of the highest performance in the industry.
• Mission Critical: Chelsio USS provides for Highly Available configurations as well as replication and snapshots.
• Scalability: Chelsio USS has been deployed in cloud applications with up to half a petabyte of data per head.

About Chelsio Communications, Inc.

 Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments.  Now shipping its fourth generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is delivering hardware and software solutions including Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions focused on specialized applications.  Visit the company at www.chelsio.com.

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Targeted at system integrators/value added resellers, the USM delivers a high performance, scalable, secure, virtualization ready, and multi-featured host-independent solution that consume very low power.

Unified Storage Motherboard (USM)

Based on a Micro-ATX form-factor with native 24 SAS port connectivity, the motherboard uses a high performance threaded quad-core processor as the heart of the system.  In addition to its SAS capabilities, the USM has two PCIe Gen 2 x 4 slots for expansion to utilize PCIe-based Solid State Disks (SSDs) or additional Ethernet or SAS ports.  The motherboard includes an LSI MegaRAID stack, and features Chelsio’s T4 ASIC, the fourth-generation silicon supporting TCP offload (TOE), iSCSI, FCoE, iWARP (RDMA), packet filtering and classification (firewall offload), and traffic streaming (media streaming).  The motherboard natively supports two ports of 1G/10G SFP+ Ethernet, two ports of 1G/10G Base-T Ethernet, two USB ports, and one serial port.

The USM also features Chelsio’s Unified Storage Server (USS) software, which is used to configure and manage the card and storage.  The USS includes a wide array of features that simplify the deployment of iSCSI block storage as well as file sharing in a dependable, reliable and scalable way.   Single, field upgradeable software image includes all the latest and self-consistent images for all the silicon.  Field diagnostic phone-home service enables remote diagnostics and preventative maintenance at the customer site.  Manufacturing diagnostics and stress software assists system integrators with integration, test and diagnostics.

Chelsio is also announcing 2U, and 4U 24-bay pre-certified storage configurations for USM based on Supermicro platforms.    Initially, USM will support iSCSI and NAS.  In future software updates, FCoE Target and NFSRDMA based on iWARP RDMA over Ethernet are enabled.

The motherboard will begin sampling later this quarter, and be in production in 1Q2013.   The street price of the Chelsio USM motherboard is $4,995.

Unified Storage Server Software

USS software supports CIFS/SMB, NFS, RDMA, FTP, HTTP, Lustre, iSCSI, FC, Thin Provisioning volumes, Volume cloning, snapshots, instant restore from snapshots, volume encryption, remote replication, compression, shared storage high availability, system monitor and alert, and a host of other features.

Some additional features of USS:

• Ease-of-Use: Use the Web-based GUI or CLI Interface to configure and deploy block and file storage. This also includes the ability to easily configure the supported RAID cards right from within USS.
• Low TCO: USS provides some of the lowest cost per Gigabyte solutions in the industry.  Users can add storage to the solution with no additional software licenses.
• Chelsio T4 Technology: USS uses Chelsio’s Unified Wire technology to provide unsurpassed off-load capabilities that provide some of the highest performance in the industry.
• Mission Critical: Chelsio USS provides for Highly Available configurations as well as replication and snapshots.
• Scalability: Chelsio USS has been deployed in cloud applications with up to half a petabyte of data per head.

About Chelsio Communications, Inc.

Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments.  Now shipping its fourth generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is delivering hardware and software solutions including Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions focused on specialized applications.  Visit the company at www.chelsio.com.

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C/ Sardenya 284-286
08013 Barcelona
Spain
Phone +34 93-265-54-62
Fax +34 93-231-19-56
www.flytech.es

Madrid Office

C/ Isabel Colbrand, 10
Nave 55-56
Edificio Alfa III
Pol. Ind. Fuencarral 28050
Madrid
Spain
Phone +34 91-300-51-09
Fax +34 91-300-28-13

All the solutions include Chelsio USS software preinstalled, which upgrades the configurations from boxes with disks into high performance, feature-rich file and block storage solutions.   The configurations are all built from Supermicro^® platforms, LSI^® RAID cards and Chelsio T4 Unified Wire Adapters.  The BOM for these configurations are available to Chelsio integrators and resellers to enable local, partial and derivative solutions.

The storage configurations are:

• Unified Storage Array, a high performance array that supports both block and file data on a single, unified platform.  One Unified Storage Array delivers up to 108 terabytes of storage, 4GB/s bandwidth, more than 250,000 IOPs performance.
• Unified Storage Head, a dual HA head solution available with or without integrated storage.  The Unified Storage Head delivers both block and file data on a single, unified platform.   It delivers 150,000 IOPs performance and 2.5GB/s bandwidth per head in a SBB form factor.

“Supermicro’s server and storage Building Block Solutions offer maximum performance, reliability and expandability for the most demanding, data-intensive applications,” said Wally Liaw, vice president of sales, International, at Supermicro. “We are pleased to have Chelsio certifying configurations based on Supermicro’s platforms that deliver increasingly higher levels of IOPs and storage capacity. Working together, we are providing customers the best quality, performance and price to help them successfully support and scale their businesses.”

Unified Storage Array

The Unified Storage Array is housed in a 4U storage chassis, which includes 36 3.5” hot-swappable drive bays.   It is available in two standard configurations:

1. ARRAY 4U36.  There are no hard drives included.  Here, the integrator provides disks for the configuration depending on the amount of storage capacity required for the application.  The US list price for the ARRAY 4U36 is $24,149.
2. ARRAY 4U36-SAS-108.  This fully populated turnkey configuration includes 36 Enterprise 3TB 6GB/s hard drives for the maximum configuration available on the configuration.   The US List price for the ARRAY 4U36-SAS-108 is $51,533.

Unified Storage Head

The Unified Storage Head comes in two configurations, as a dual HA head with integrated SAS storage in an SBB form factor, and as a dual HA head with external storage in a 2U form factor.  The SAS configuration utilizes a 3U storage chassis, with dual SBB-compliant motherboards, and 16 3.5” hot-swappable drive bays per head.   The 2U form factor is available with dual motherboards and six hot swappable drives per bay head.   SBB configurations are available with or without storage drives:

1. TWINHEAD-SBB.  No storage drives are included, providing complete solution flexibility to the system integrator.  US list price: $40,383.
2. TWINHEAD-SBB-SAS-48.  A fully populated, turnkey solution with 16 3TB Enterprise SAS drives.  US list price: $52,958.
3. TWINHEAD. An unpopulated configuration intended to be a front-end configuration to an external array.  US list price is $46,617.

Chelsio Unified Storage Server (USS) Software

Some features of USS include:

• Ease-of-Use: Use the Web-based GUI, Local GUI, or Character Cell interface to configure and deploy block and file storage. This also includes the ability to easily configure the supported RAID cards right from within USS.
• Low TCO: USS provides some of the lowest cost per Gigabyte solutions in the industry.  Users can add storage to the solution with no additional software licenses.
• Chelsio T4 Technology: USS uses Chelsio’s Unified Wire technology to provide unsurpassed off-load capabilities that provide some of the highest performance in the industry.
• Mission Critical: Chelsio USS provides for Highly Available configurations as well as replication and snapshots.

About Chelsio Communications, Inc.

Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments.  Now shipping its fourth generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is delivering hardware and software solutions including Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions focused on specialized applications.  Visit the company at www.chelsio.com.

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New From Chelsio: a family of pre-certified configurations that enable high performance storage for the most demanding applications, including scalable cloud storage and HPC distributed storage. System integrators and resellers interested in unprecedented price-performance storage solutions should email sales@chelsio.com.

Unified Storage Array

108 TB, 4GB/s, 250,000 IOPs, Enterprise SAS Storage — a Pre-certified Configuration

The Chelsio Unified Storage Array is built from a combination of Supermicro and LSI components to provide an optimal solution that includes Chelsio’s Unified Storage Server (USS) software to seamlessly support both block and file data on a single, unified platform. One Unified Storage Array delivers up to 108 terabytes of storage, 4GB/s bandwidth, more than 250,000 IOPs performance.

• Unified Storage Array: 4U36-SAS-108 and 4U36 Product Brief

Unified Storage Head

Dual HA Head with or without Integrated Storage — a Pre-certified Configuration

The Chelsio Unified Storage Head is a dual HA head solution available with or without integrated storage. Built with the Supermicro Storage Bridge Bay (SBB) product, the Unified Storage Head utilizes Chelsio’s USS software to deliver both block and file data on a single, unified platform. The Unified Storage Head delivers 150,000 IOPs and 2.5 Gb/s bandwidth per SBB head.

• Unified Storage Head: Twinhead-SBB-SAS Product Brief

• Unified Storage Head: Twinhead Product Brief

Related Links

• Request A Quote
• Free Unified Storage Server 30 day Trial

Additionally, Chelsio is announcing new versions of its Unified Storage Router (USR) appliances specifically tailored for Windows Server 2012.   The Chelsio SMB Direct Router is a plug-and-play solution that delivers cost-effective, line-rate (10Gb) performance between Microsoft Windows Server 2012 SMB Direct on the Windows side to existing iSCSI, SAS and Fibre Channel storage.

Chelsio 10Gb Ethernet RDMA for SMB Direct adapters and SMB Direct Router will be on display this week at Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA.  The demo shows line rate performance for SMB Direct over iWARP RDMA for Ethernet-based topologies.

“Windows Server 2012 provides breakthrough innovations in storage technology,” said Jose Barreto, principal program manager, File Server Foundation, Microsoft.  “These capabilities give companies such as Chelsio, with its Unified Wire T4 Adapters, a strong foundation for Windows storage appliances that Chelsio will demonstrate at the Storage Developer Conference.”

“The combination of Ethernet and iWARP RDMA is an excellent, cost-effective solution for storage applications,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio.  “The offload capability of the adapters enables the deployment of less expensive CPU’s on the server side, enabling a more efficient virtualized cloud infrastructure.”

SMB Direct over iWARP RDMA Demonstration

The demonstration at Storage Developer Conference connects a system running Windows Server 2012 running as an SMB 3.0 client connecting to another server running Windows Server 2012 working as an SMB 3.0 file server.  The data is being transferred at 10Gb line rate using SMB Direct protocol over iWARP RDMA from the SMB client to the router to SMB server.

RDMA over Ethernet (iWARP RDMA)

RDMA over Ethernet (iWARP) is an industry-standard low latency protocol developed by the IETF and supported by the industry’s leading 10Gb Ethernet adapters.  Since it is built on top of TCP/IP, it is routable and scalable from just a few to thousands of co-located or geographically dispersed endpoints and is resilient to any data center topology or speed.  It further can work independent of the DCBX protocol, thereby decoupling the server and switch refresh cycles.

Chelsio Unified Wire Adapters

Ideal for all data, storage and high performance clustering applications, Chelsio Unified Wire adapters enable 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.

SMB Direct Routers

Chelsio is delivering four new Unified Storage Routers for SMB Direct.  These are single blade router appliances to connect SMB Direct to iSCSI, Fibre Channel and SAS.  Pricing for these routers starts at $9,995 (US list).

• USR1100-SMB-E:  2 x 1/10GbE + 2 x 1/10GbE-CR connector, SMB Direct to iSCSI
• USR1100-SMB-FC: 2 x 8G FC + 2 x 1/10GbE-CR connector, SMB Direct to Fibre Channel
• USR1100-SMB-SAS: 2 x 6G SAS + 2 x 1/10GbE-CR connector, SMB Direct to SAS
• USR1100-SMB-SAS-BT: 2 x 6G SAS + 2 x 1/10G Base-T connector, SMB Direct to SAS

About Chelsio Communications, Inc.

Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments.  Now shipping its fourth generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is delivering hardware and software solutions including Unified Wire Ethernet network adapter cards, unified storage software, high performance storage gateways, unified management software, bypass cards, and other solutions focused on specialized applications.  Visit the company at www.chelsio.com.

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