Chelsio Communications, a provider of 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) adapters, ASICs, and storage offerings, has unveiled its fourth generation high performance 10Gb ethernet silicon technology.
The T4 includes TCP offload (TOE) design, third generation iSCSI design, and second-generation iWARP (RDMA) implementation. It supports TCP, iSCSI offload and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) offload; and enables the unified wire by simultaneously allowing unmodified IP traffic, InfiniBand and Fibre Channel applications to run over ethernet at wire speed, the company said.
Chelsio said that the T4 is a single-chip product to concurrently support TOE, iSCSI, FCoE and iWARP offload, and is suitable for all high performance clustering applications, storage networks and data networks. Its pipeline supports simultaneous cut-through operation for both transmit and receive paths, while its processing architecture provides support for wire-speed operation at small packet size.
For server connections, the T4 integrates a PCI Express v2.0 x8 host interface, and with support for the 5Gbps Gen2 data rate, the PCIe interface provides up to 32Gbps of bandwidth to the server. It also adds support for PCIe I/O virtualisation.
On the network side, the T4 integrates four ethernet ports that support GbE as well as 10GbE operation. All four ports provide direct support for 10GBASE-KR and of those two ports support the four-lane 10GBASE-CX4/KX4 interfaces, the company said.
The T4 also adds support for both partial and full offload of the FCoE protocol in addition to full iSCSI offload. In addition, it also supports priority-based flow control, enhanced transmission selection and the data centre bridging exchange protocol, Chelsio said.
Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio Communications, said: “The networks are converging around 10Gb Ethernet for a number of reasons, and the day is coming when enterprise data center network and storage traffic will be sharing a common infrastructure. Our fourth generation technology is unmatched in the industry, and our OEM partners understand that offloading protocols such as iWARP and iSCSI requires a reliable, tested TCP engine.
