Chelsio to Extend RDMA Over Ethernet to Microsoft's Cloud

Chelsio Communications announced that its T5 Adapters RDMA over Ethernet solution will operate in Microsoft's Cloud Platform System (CPS), which lets customers operate a scalable cloud built from Azure.

Chelsio's T5 adapters selected for Microsoft's solution are RDMA-capable Unified Wire adapters that simultaneously offload iSCSI, FCoE, RDMA and sockets applications, along with traffic management and QoS. Chelsio said its iWARP RDMA is well suited for CPS due to its high performance and interoperability. iWARP RDMA provides routability, reliability and congestion control ,which allow it to operate over any standard Ethernet infrastructure, from clusters to wide area networks and clouds.

Microsoft's CPS networking infrastructure is comprised of an Ethernet based frontend fabric and an RDMA enabled storage backend fabric, which utilizes the SMB Direct protocol for high efficiency, high performance storage networking. The SMB Direct protocol enables high throughput, low latency and high efficiency storage, and unprecedented performance in virtual machine mobility. Native system software support for iWARP RDMA in Windows Server 2012 R2 simplifies storage and Virtual Machines management for IT administrators, with no network reconfiguration required.

"iWARP continues to be the preferred solution for RDMA over Ethernet combining robust high performance with maximum interoperability and scalability. T5 is the ideal solution for the cloud and storage applications. We are thrilled with the selection of Chelsio's adapters within the Microsoft CPS," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO, Chelsio Communications.

Vijay Tewari, Principle Group Manager, Microsoft, explained: "When we set out to build a high performance and high efficiency storage network, we thoroughly evaluated the different RDMA alternatives, and determined that Chelsio's particularly robust and high performance implementation of iWARP RDMA provided the best fit for the Microsoft Cloud Platform System. The plug-and-play nature of iWARP over standard Ethernet enables our customers to fully realize the performance benefits of SMB Direct 3.0."

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