Storage Networking Offloads

The elevated performance requirements of emerging storage architectures necessitate superior performance from the underlying networking technology for customers to achieve the true effectiveness of their data centers. Enterprises have been unambiguous that they want to deploy flash storage across hundreds to thousands of servers using the most cost-effective and efficient networking available to maximize their return on investment. T6 Unified Wire Adapters provide such access using a variety of offloaded protocols, including NVMe/TCP, iSCSI and NVMe-oF, to reduce CPU utilization, and increase bandwidth and IOPs. T6 also enables a seamless migration path to 200/400GbE storage networking, while offering the flexibility to fully leverage existing software investments. 

NVMe/TCP

NVMe/TCP boosts enterprise, private, public and hybrid cloud, managed service providers, and telco data centers to utilize highly efficient NVMe flash storage platforms using industry-standard TCP/IP networking, allowing businesses to enjoy a smooth transition path from legacy storage solutions to modern storage platforms. Chelsio T6 Unified Wire delivers the highest performance and efficiency for NVMe/TCP, demonstrating our technology leadership in the space. T6 hardware offload-based NVMe/TCP initiator and target-level acceleration solutions enable enterprises and storage system vendors to take advantage of operational advantages of NVMe/TCP using cost-effective, flexible and future-proof designs.

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Benchmarks demonstrate Chelsio T6 Unified Wire adapters deliver up to full-line rate 100 Gb/s performance using the NVMe/TCP protocol including securing connections over IPsec and TLS using hardware-offloaded encryption and decryption. In addition, T6 delivers unique TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE)-based NVMe/TCP hardware acceleration for storage target and initiator functions over TCP/IP networks, providing unparalleled performance and CPU efficiency. Chelsio’s T6 NVMe/TCP solution is fully capable of offloading TCP/IP processing of Kernel and User space SPDK NVMe/TCP target to hardware at up to 100Gbps. It provides a low latency, high throughput and CPU-efficient Ethernet solution for connecting high performance NVMe SSDs over a scalable, congestion controlled and traffic managed fabric.

iSCSI

With support from all the major storage vendors, as well as from a host of Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage players, Internet Small Computer System Interface or iSCSI is the most mature and widely supported storage protocol available. Almost all other major server operating systems and hypervisors support iSCSI natively, too. The iSCSI protocol has also benefited from its ease of adoption. The protocol uses standard 1/10/25/40/50/100 Gigabit Ethernet transport, is transmitted using TCP/IP, which can often help simplify the implementation and operational requirements of large data center environments.

The Chelsio T6 adapters offload a variety of protocols including iSCSI. iSCSI offload enables low latency, higher IOPS, and lower processor utilization for iSCSI storage solutions. In addition, both initiator and target iSCSI offloads are available, allowing offload on both sides of the connection. Chelsio T6 iSCSI offload adapters should be considered for any iSCSI application where processor utilization is an issue, or a performance boost is desired. These include any small block workloads as well as servers with limited processor capacity. Real-World small block applications can add significant processing requirements which can cause CPUs to limit performance. Any of these types of applications and workloads can benefit from Chelsio T6 iSCSI offload adapters.

NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF)

NVMe over Fabrics defines an efficient mechanism to utilize large scale NVMe storage deployments over Ethernet RDMA (iWARP/RoCE) networking. This enables NVMe storage systems to be shared, pooled and managed more effectively. Chelsio T6 adapters provide a foundation for lower latency and increased performance, while providing improved Ethernet RDMA integration for flash-based storage.

Customers acquire flash storage to share it across multiple applications using the most efficient networking available to maximize ROI. T6-enabled storage networking will be a critical tool in meeting these business goals. With its ultra-low-latency Chelsio T6 1/10/25/40/50/100GbE delivers ‘no compromise’ performance and efficiency for NVMe/TCP, iSCSI and NVMe-oF.