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When Chelsio Communications (News - Alert) first introduced its Terminator 3 (T3) technology, the goal was to consolidate three independent infrastructures - storage, computing and TCP/IP networking – into one unified network, something which would produce both monetary and practical rewards.

Riding on the success of the T3 adapters, last year Chelsio introduced its fourth generation of high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) silicon technology the Terminator 4 (T4). Today, company officials announced this morning the availability of its fourth generation T4 technology in the first release of a new family of 10 GbE and 1GbE adapter cards. The adapter cards are sampling now and will be available in volume in March.

Chelsio, a leading provider of 10 GbE unified wire adapters and ASICs, announced that the T4 adapters are the first in the industry to simultaneously offload all the major networking and storage protocols, including TCP, UDP (News - Alert), iWARP, iSCSI and FCoE, with support for most virtualization protocols, including Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV). Additionally, the Chelsio cards all use the same chip, same firmware and software for all the adapters, unlike many competitors that can only provide offload for one protocol at a time.

“Chelsio’s T4 technology is a feature rich solution, delivering outstanding performance while supporting a wide range of protocols,” said Bill Mannel, vice president of product marketing for SGI, in a statement. “The massive growth in cloud services, HPC and data centers is driving the need to maximize equipment densities and minimize power consumption, and Chelsio’s T4 adapters are well suited to deliver on the increasing demand for network convergence.”

The T4 offers a “unified fabric” over a single wire by simultaneously running all unmodified IP sockets, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand applications over Ethernet at line rate, making the technology ideal for all data, storage and high-performance clustering applications. The Chelsio adapters are designed to bolster virtualized data centers, cloud service installations and high performance computing environments.  

There will be seven new adapters based on the T4 ASIC, and additional cards will be rolled out next quarter.

The seven new adapters include:

-          T420-CR. 2x10Gb Ethernet, low profile, 32K offloaded connections, SFP+ connector

-          T440-CR. 4x10Gb Ethernet, half size, 32K offloaded connections, SFP+ connector

-          T420-BCH. 2x10Gb Ethernet daughter card for IBM (News - Alert) BladeCenter H, 32K offloaded connections

-          T420-SO-CR. 2x10Gb Ethernet, low profile, memory free, 128 offloaded connections, SFP+ connector

-          T420-CX. 2x10Gb Ethernet low profile, 32K offloaded connections, CX4 connector

-          T422-CR. 2x1Gb and 2x10Gb Ethernet, low profile, 32K offloaded connections, SFP+ and RJ45 connectors

-          T404-BT (News - Alert). 4x1Gb Ethernet, low profile, 32K offloaded connections, RJ-45 connector

All the new adapters have SR-IOV-enabled PCIe x8 Gen2 host interfaces, and are capable of fully offloading TCP, UDP, iWARP, iSCSI, and FCoE, with EVB/VEPA/VNTag (802.1Qbg, 802.1Qbh) and DCB support. All the adapters include unique hardware features including fine granularity time stamping, tracing, filtering and traffic management.

The T4 adapters offer “extensive offload capabilities” and advantages for virtualized environments as they switch traffic from up to 140 virtual and physical ports within the T4 adapter. The T4 supports PCIe SR-IOV (8 Physical Functions, 128 Virtual Functions) with advanced QoS and traffic management functionality, enabling state-of-the-art virtualization design. 

The T4 adapters will also find their place in cloud installations as the technology offers a feature-rich virtualized card and enables immediate re-tasking of any installation to any application or workload. The T4 adapters also provide a very high IOPs and messaging rate.

“Our T4 adapters are unmatched in the industry,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh (News - Alert), president and CEO, in a statement. “They are the most complete Converged Network Adapters and are ideally suited for cloud applications where a multi-purpose adapter is a requirement. Our customers understand that implementation of a successful iSCSI or iWARP protocol requires a reliable, tested TCP engine and here Chelsio stands alone.”

“A T4-based solution will future-proof any storage or server platform design, providing maximum interoperability, performance and choice of middleware,” Naghshineh added. “Meanwhile, our T3 products have been one of the most successful Ethernet solutions in the last four years. We anticipate ongoing success with the T3 and plan to continue the production of these products for many more years.”  

For High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster applications, T4 reduces Remote Direct Memory Access verbs latency from about seven microseconds in the T3 to about three microseconds, providing similar application performance as InfiniBand at a much lower cost, company officials say. The 10 GbE company has also equipped the T4s with UDP-offload features, delivering three microsecond application-to-application latency for UDP packets. 

All seven adapters are sampling now and will be in volume production this quarter.

Chelsio demonstrated the high performance capabilities of its T4 adapters at the end of last year at the Supercomputer Conference (SC’10) in New Orleans, La.