Chelsio Newsletter, September 2014

As the iSCSI and iWARP RDMA over 40Gb Ethernet market momentum accelerates, this quarter has seen Chelsio participate in a number of industry firsts, notably the first NVMe over Fabrics prototype demonstration, and first 40Gb FCoE VN2VN (with BB6) product launch.

New Products
Chelsio released a number of new software products during Q3, including:

• Unified Boot Option ROM for Legacy and uEFI
• iSCSI Initiator driver for ESXi5.5
• iSCSI Target driver for FreeBSD
• NVGRE offload for Windows Server 2012 R2

On the hardware side, Chelsio delivered support for the Intel 40GbE Ethernet Modular Optics and Cabling Solution. With a dramatically lower price point than existing solutions, the new optics will accelerate the pace of 40GbE adoption.

Recent Publications
Chelsio was a Gold sponsor of the 2014 Storage Developer Conference, and presented updates on NFS over RDMA and iSCSI Offload at the conference.

Chelsio also published a number of new reports and whitepapers this quarter, as the converged suite of protocols gets enabled over 40GbE across the major operating systems.

• Chelsio’s T580 iWARP RDMA adapter was used in the industry’s first demonstration of NVMe over Fabrics, meeting performance targets for both latency and IOPS, as shown by Intel at the 2014 Intel Developer Forum.

• Chelsio published a paper introducing NVMe over Fabrics, showing how Chelsio’s 40Gb iWARP RDMA solution delivers the promise of scalable high performance storage, with a predictable roadmap to 100Gb and beyond.

• Chelsio published a paper comparing 40Gb iSCSI performance with iSER over Ethernet and FDR InfiniBand, showing how hardware offloaded iSCSI provides high performance with its built-in RDMA, while preserving the large installed base. In contrast, iSER improves over software implementations with an incompatible emulation layer over RDMA, requiring RNIC adapters on both ends.

• Chelsio published benchmark results comparing Lustre over iWARP with IB-FDR. iWARP at 40Gb is shown to provide nearly the same performance as IB-FDR on a single port, while operating over standard Ethernet infrastructure, with no special configuration or management.

• Chelsio published early benchmark results for 40Gb NFS over iWARP RDMA on Linux. The promising results show significant performance benefits and better CPU efficiency with RDMA compared to the host stack running over a standard server NIC.

• Chelsio published a report comparing SMB Latency over NIC and iWARP RDMA, showing up to 40% lower latency with RDMA. When paired with low latency storage, RDMA allows realizing the full performance potential of the solution.

• Chelsio and Intel published a paper presenting the reasons that make iWARP the preferred RDMA solution to deliver low latency, high performance, routed scalability and improved CPU efficiency for enterprise applications, as well as public and private clouds. Chelsio and Intel’s partnership is helping dispel the confusion in the RDMA over Ethernet space. With stable and mature standards and implementations, iWARP RDMA is available today at 40Gbps. There is no need to risk the unknown, waiting for other approaches to resolve basic issues, and rewrite specifications at every step.

• With support from Microsoft, Intel reaffirmed commitment to iWARP RDMA. With iWARP support poised for inclusion in upcoming Intel server chipsets, Intel recommends new RDMA deployments to use iWARP. In the joint talk with Intel at IDF’14, Microsoft presented RDMA results using Chelsio’s iWARP RDMA adapters, demonstrating the scalability and robustness of the solution. The combination of high performance iWARP silicon available from Chelsio, and the impending integrated iWARP solution from Intel makes iWARP the natural choice for RDMA design decisions today.

• Chelsio published benchmark results for FC-BB-6 VN2VN FCoE in Linux. Chelsio’s solution is the first to deliver line rate 40Gb FCoE, and thanks to VN2VN, eliminates the need for expensive FCF switches and gateways, raising one of the barriers to FCoE adoption.

• Chelsio published benchmark results for 40Gb NIC operation over Windows Server 2012 R2 comparing Chelsio’s T580-SO-CR and Mellanox’s CX-3 Pro adapter. The results establish Chelsio’s solution as the highest performance and highest efficiency adapter for Windows.

• Chelsio published NIC and TOE benchmark results for OpenIndiana that illustrate the benefits of Chelsio’s TCP offload technology over regular server adapters.

Learn More

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

In the Wild
With Support from Microsoft, Intel Commits to iWARP
Industry leaders continue development of iWARP standards
Intel NVMe over Fabrics at IDF’14
Demartek on NVMe over Chelsio’s iWARP RDMA Fabrics Demonstration
Chelsio Update on NFS/RDMA over iWARP at the 2014 Storage Developer Conference
Chelsio Update on iSCSI at the 2014 Storage Developer Conference
Chelsio Adapters Certified by VMware