Monday, September 25, 2006

Chelsio's 3rd Gen Adapter ASIC Integrates NIC, iSCSI, RDMA and TOE

Chelsio Communications introduced its third generation Ethernet protocol acceleration engine, integrating NIC, iSCSI, RDMA and TOE with wire virtualization functionality to enable convergence of storage, clustering, and networking applications onto a single unified fabric. The Terminator 3 (T3) ASIC runs full wire-rate 10Gbps at less than 5% CPU utilization. It combines NIC, iSCSI Target and Initiator, industry standard iWARP RDMA, and TOE functionalities with integrated dual 1 GbpE / 10GbpE ports and both native PCI-Express and PCI-X 2.0 / 1.0 (266 / 133 MHz) host bus interfaces.



The T3 ASIC also enables 10 Gbps adapter cards to support remote management and value added features, such as traffic management, line rate traffic classification and filtering, and virtualization on top of the core offload technology. These unique features enable the use of T3 in various embedded applications such as blade servers, video servers, application gateways and performance proxies, server and storage virtualization, SAN arrays, and NAS filers.



At this week's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Chelsio Communications is demonstrating its 10 Gbps iWARP RDMA Ethernet adapter running an unmodified RDMA application over an Ethernet network. The demo features an Oracle Database using the OpenFabrics API to run indistinguishably over InfiniBand or Ethernet. Chelsio's adapter, based on the new Terminator 3 (T3) ASIC, shows the power of the Unified Wire to run InfiniBand and Fibre Channel applications with lower latency, and higher bandwidth, in addition to high performance TCP/IP applications.



Chelsio said this milestone heralds the era of Ethernet as a high performance clustering fabric, requiring no changes to existing cluster applications, while bringing in Ethernet's versatility and ease of use and management.

http://www.chelsio.com

  • In June 2006, Chelsio Communications, a start-up offering 10-Gigabit Ethernet server adapters and protocol acceleration technology, announced the first close of a private venture funding round, raising a total of $12 million and adding LSI Logic as a new investor. The company said the new funding provides sufficient capital to reach profitability and will be used to grow the business and ramp production of Chelsio's next generation product line that addresses the growing demand for 10GbE protocol offload.