Chelsio Newsletter, July 2014

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New Products
The recognized leaders in 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet performance and network convergence, Chelsio’s T5-based adapters offer unprecented throughput and efficiency for cloud, storage and compute applications. In addition to a unique combination of TCP/UDP/IP sockets, iSCSI, FCoE and RDMA offload, they also address key verticals that have traditionally required specialized hardware.

In this context, Chelsio recently released netmap support into FreeBSD, offering what is deemed to be “disruptive performance” by experts in the field. Chelsio also released benchmark results for its NVGRE Offload solution for cloud virtualization, showing performance far superior to competing offerings.

Today, Chelsio’s adapters are the highest performing, most feature rich, but also most cost effective adapters, with the T520-SO-CR and T580-SO-CR leading in the 10GbE and 40GbE segments respectively. With T5, it is now possible to address all networking, clustering and storage needs using a single architecture, with one firmware image, one software suite, and a single qualification effort, resulting in tremendous cost savings.

Good News and Bad News
Good news for everyone considering deploying a high speed network infrastructure: 40GbE defies historic trends by reaching mass appeal levels shortly after its introduction, as street prices of 40GbE adapter and switch ports drop to new levels. Furthermore, with 100GbE already shipping and 400GbE on the horizon, Ethernet is now leading in performance, not simply on price curve. Driven by Big Data, the Ethernet economies of scale train is on track and switching into high gear.

Bad news for InfiniBand and other technologies that depend on Ethernet speeds lagging behind to carve out lucrative niches: with RDMA over Ethernet getting to 100Gb in sync with IB, and 40GbE switch and adapter attach list prices that are nearly 40% lower than IB FDR, it is the hardest ever to justify selecting IB for any new deployments. Add to that an iWARP roadmap that takes it into the chipset with Intel Fort Park, and the light at the end of the tunnel for IB may well be the Ethernet train.

Virtualized iSCSI
Chelsio recently released its iSCSI initiator for the ESXi5.5 hypervisor, providing hardware offloaded storage performance to virtual machines. Relieving the virtualization bottlenecks on both the system and network sides is an area of focus, where Chelsio’s T5 engine provides significant benefits thanks to a complete suite of hardware offloads. Today, iSCSI is shipping at 40Gb and providing 3M IOPs, going to 100Gb and 8M IOPs in the next iteration. Its ubiquity with integrated software initiators in all operating systems, and leveraging TCP/IP and legacy networking gear – hence entailing no interoperability or deployment challenges – the true SAN fabric that can scale from SMB applications to high end enterprise flash arrays. It now fully makes sense to migrate SAN installations from 8Gb or 16Gb FC directly to 40Gb iSCSI, and jump on the Ethernet bullet train.

Recent Publications
This quarter saw a number of exciting publications, including white papers, benchmark results and relevant news:

  • The IETF recently published RFC 7306, co-authored by Broadcom, Chelsio and Intel, the first in a series of ongoing updates and feature enhancements for iWARP, the Internet standard for RDMA over Ethernet.
  • Chelsio published a white paper highlighting the Plug-and-Debug chores that RoCE entails, in contrast to the user-firendly and Cloud-ready iWARP RDMA over Ethernet.
  • Chelsio published a technical brief on the Evolution of iWARP, as it grew from clusters to mainstream deployment at datacenter and Cloud hyper-scales.
  • Chelsio published a paper comparing NVGRE Offload performance of the T520-LL-CR versus Mellanox’s ConnextX-3 Pro adapter. A Microsoft cloud platform can now use the same T5 chip for the iWARP storage fabric as well as the tennant fabric. One driver, one vendor, more economies of scale.
  • Chelsio published a paper on netmap, showing unpredencented networking performance in regular server environments.
  • Chelsio published a technical brief demonstrating line rate performance in a virtualized environment with iWARP to the VM.
  • Chelsio published a technical brief on offload traffic failover across multiple adapters, part of the advanced reliability, high availability and data integrity features that set Chelsio’s T5 apart, and make it an ideal storage adapter.
  • Dell published a technical brief on USR.

Learn More

  • See a complete list of recent Chelsio whitepapers here.
  • See a complete list of Chelsio performance benchmarks here.

Latest Software and Drivers

  • T5/T4 Unified Wire v2.10.0.0 for Linux
  • T5/T4 Unified Wire v5.0.0.31 for Windows
  • T5/T4 Network Driver v1.10.11 for Mac OS X
  • T5/T4 Unified Boot Option ROM v1.0.0.68 for DOS
  • T5/T4 Network driver v3.0.0.3 for OpenIndiana
  • T5/T4 Network driver v1.3.0 for ESXi5.5
  • T5/T4 Unified Wire v1.2.6.0 for XenServer 6.2.0
  • T5 iSCSI Initiator driver v0.9.9.0 for ESXi5.5

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