Chelsio Communications, a provider of Ethernet unified wire adapters and ASICs for storage networking, virtualised enterprise data centres, cloud services and cluster computing environments, announced benchmark testing results for the integrated packet handling capabilities of its Terminator 6 (T6) 100 Gigabit Ethernet adapters.
During the testing, Chelsio's T6 100 Gbit/s adapters demonstrated packet processing performance for the small size 64 Bytes network packets of up to 75 MPPS, when measuring transmit (Tx) and receive (Rx) network traffic independently. Bi-directional network processing for 64 and 128 Bytes packets delivered performance of 93 MPPS, saturating the PCI Gen3 x16 bus.
Chelsio stated that this packet processing performance can enable the rapid deployment of network function virtualisation (NFV) in both service provider and enterprise network cloud deployments.
The T6 100 Gigabit Ethernet unified wire adapter, launched in March, offers line rate throughput of over 176 Gbit/s for 512 Bytes packets and up to 93 MPPS bi-directional packet rate for small packets, which the company claims will help to enable large-scale NFV deployments.
Chelsio's T6 adapters provide flexible support for 1, 10, 25, 40, 50 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces together with offload capabilities including iWARP, storage protocol acceleration (iSCSI, NVMe-oF and FCoE) and DPDK acceleration. The T6 adapters are designed to accelerate DPDK-based networking applications by increasing bandwidth and packet rate (MPPS).
By offloading compute-intensive server-based networking functions and utilising multi-CPU socket platforms more efficiently, the solution can help deliver improved performance, while CPU cycles are freed for additional applications processing.
Chelsio noted that its unified wire adapters utilise DPDK-based poll mode driver (PMD), designed to enable fast packet processing and low latency, eliminating the need for data to traverse the Linux kernel and avoiding interrupt handling overhead for sending and receiving data to the x86 server. The T6 DPDK-based driver targets high-instruction compute node and service node applications such as cybersecurity and telecom wired/wireless infrastructure applications.Chelsio T6 adapters also feature offload for traffic management, packet classification and filtering, OVS offload, and crypto functions. When combined and configured with the DPDK interfaces, these capabilities can enhance DPDK functionality by enabling network security, monitoring and QoS for incoming/outgoing traffic.
