Chelsio Communications
Solving High Performance Networking for Enterprise Data Centers

Chelsio is a leading technology company focused on solving high performance networking and storage challenges for virtualized enterprise data centers, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments. Now shipping its fifth generation protocol acceleration technology, Chelsio is the market and technology leader enabling the convergence of networking, storage and clustering traffic over 10/40Gb Ethernet.

With the proliferation of massive data centers, efficient operation and power consumption are more critical than ever. At the same time cloud computing and server virtualization are driving the need for more homogenous and uniform designs than the traditional data-center architectures can offer. With its proven Terminator ASIC technology designed into more than 100 OEM platforms and the successful deployment of more than 800,000 ports, Chelsio has enabled 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet (10/40GbE) unified wire solutions for LAN, SAN and cluster traffic in enterprise and cloud data centers.

Chelsio 10/40GbE iWARP RDMA Ethernet adapters exhibit dramatically improved storage performance for Hyper-V applications as well as ensure that server CPU consumption when accessing storage is kept to a minimum. Instead of paying for SAN-based storage, customers can use Windows Server 2012 file share storage for Hyper-V and SQL Server.

The Chelsio 10/40GbE iWARP RDMA solution fully offloads the host CPU, resulting in more efficient Microsoft virtualized data center installs. Native system software support for iWARP RDMA in Windows Server 2012 R2 simplifies storage and Virtual Machines management for enterprise and cloud IT administrators, with no network reconfiguration required.Windows Server 2012 SMB Direct 3.0 over iWARP RDMA provides higher storage performance by giving Hyper-V servers direct access to the data that resides on a remote file server, while the CPU reduction enables a larger number of VMs per Hyper-V server, unlocking CapEx and OpEx savings in power dissipation, system configuration and deployment scale throughout the life of the installation.

The Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS) solution is an integrated software and hardware solution enabling enterprises to operate a scalable cloud built using experiences from Azure.

The CPS networking infrastructure includes a storage back-end 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.

Chelsio’s T5 10GbE adapters selected for Microsoft’s CPS solution are based upon the fifth generation of Terminator ASIC architecture. These are RDMA-capable Unified Wire adapters that simultaneously offload iSCSI, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), RDMA and sockets applications, along with traffic management and QoS.

Chelsio T5 adapters, used for storage networking within Microsoft’s new Cloud Platform System (CPS), can also be used for front-end network connectivity, with support for Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE) offload. Offloading NVGRE encapsulated frames allows all stateless NIC offloads to be preserved, resulting in line-rate performance and low CPU utilization for virtualized networks.

Delivery iWARP RDMA interconnect with full SMB Direct support for Windows Server 2012 R2 environments

With the combined efficiencies of Chelsio’s iWARP RDMA and NVGRE offload, customers can fully realize the benefits of the new Microsoft CPS platform to consolidate their servers, reduce power consumption, while maintaining the performance levels their applications require. The CapEx and OpEX savings due to improved efficiency enable the deployment of more scalable and more powerful IT infrastructures.