Features:

CHELSIO, SUN PARTNER TO DELIVER HIGH PERFORMANCE NETWORKING
by Tim Curns, Editor

Chelsio Communications, Inc., a leader in 10-Gigabit Ethernet adapter cards and protocol acceleration technology, announced it is collaborating with Sun Microsystems, Inc. to develop drivers for Chelsio’s family of performance- leading 10Gb Ethernet Server Adapters to run on the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) for SPARC, AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon-processor based systems.

Chelsio is currently shipping the driver for the Solaris OS for its N110 10Gb Ethernet NIC and will have a driver available for its T110 10Gb Ethernet Protocol Engine adapter later this year. The T110 is the only 10Gb Ethernet adapter available in the market today that supports full TCP/IP offload engine (TOE), iSCSI acceleration and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) in hardware, delivering the industry’s highest performance solution. Competitors either have 10Gb Ethernet NICs without TOE, or 1Gb Ethernet NICs with TOE. Chelsio’s T110 was recently benchmarked and independently verified to deliver more than double the throughput and up to five times the CPU efficiency of competitor’s 10Gb Ethernet adapters available today.

Software applications will benefit from Chelsio technology because the CPU is freed from basic TCP/IP stack processing tasks, and more available for application processing. For instance, multi-processor systems use less CPUs than competition with Chelsio technology. High-performance clusters, storage area networking, network attached storage and direct attached servers will benefit from these advantages.

"Our customers are continually seeking higher levels of performance for their most demanding network server applications. The combination of 10Gb Ethernet and the streamlined IP Stack in Solaris 10 will enable us to deliver unprecedented network performance," said Glenn Weinberg, vice president, Operating Platforms Group at Sun. "Our partnership with Chelsio will benefit customers by providing higher throughput and lower latency capabilities for their IT infrastructures."

"Sun has been an excellent partner for Chelsio, as both companies share a common vision for enabling high-performance network computing," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio. "We are proud to be a member of the Solaris ecosystem with our high performance 10Gb Ethernet adapters and are excited to be working with Sun to bring the proven benefits of our protocol acceleration technology to the Solaris OS."

Randy Smith, director of marketing for Chelsio, elaborated on Chelsio's choosing of Sun. "The combination of Sun's server technology and Chelsio's one-two punch of 10Gb Ethernet AND full protocol offload (e.g. TCP/IP offload) enables new levels of performance at the platform/system/network level not only in terms of high throughput and low latency, but also CPU efficiency (i.e. low CPU utilization enable by offloading the TCP/IP stack to our hardware)," said Smith. "Offloading the TCP/IP stack to Chelsio hardware means the CPUs in Sun's servers can spend a lot more of its cycles running the applications."

Additionally, Chelsio is working with Sun to optimize its T110 for the new high-performance TCP/IP architecture in Solaris (known as project FireEngine), to provide customers with significant performance advantages and cost savings.