FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CHELSIO DELIVERS NEXT-GENERATION iSCSI PRODUCT FAMILY FEATURING BREAKTHROUGHS IN PERFORMANCE AND PORT DENSITY
New iSCSI Target Stack Delivers 400,000 IOPS on Chelsio Gigabit Adapters and ASICs
SUNNYVALE, CA, SEPTEMBER 7, 2005 – To meet the growing demand for IP-based storage networking, Chelsio Communications Inc. today announced a new commercial-grade iSCSI target stack that delivers more than 400,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS). Building on the strengths of its 2nd generation Terminator ASIC product line, the enhanced iSCSI product family provides storage OEMs with breakthrough performance and port density and greatly reduces design-in cost while maintaining complete software compatibility with the Chelsio product family. The newly-released stack is available as a free upgrade to all existing and future Chelsio products. In addition, Chelsio is making its Terminator ASIC chips available for OEM design-ins.
Several data-intensive applications on the market such as video streaming, image processing and backup that require high-throughput will benefit from Chelsio’s iSCSI performance. Specific applications include SAN edge devices including storage arrays, storage-aware devices in the SAN cloud such as virtualization engines, and IP-based data centers based on the emerging blade server product category.
Chelsio’s iSCSI product line includes the T204, a quad-port GbE iSCSI/TOE PCI-X adapter, and the T210 single-port 10GbE iSCSI/TOE PCI-X adapter, as well as the Terminator ASIC optimized for storage OEM applications. Each of the adapter and controller products feature full commercial-grade iSCSI target-mode support.
Storage Computer is excited that Chelsio’s unique iSCSI target-mode products are available for certification and deployment with our industry-leading iSCSI target appliance offerings, said Ricardo Velez-McCaskey, chief technical officer, Storage Computer Corporation (AMEX:SOS). The iSCSI market is in ramp mode and we view the Chelsio iSCSI target-mode solution as a vital component for delivering enterprise-level IP SAN solutions to our storage OEM partners.
The new Chelsio iSCSI offering complements our strategy of offering leading price/performance open storage solutions, said Barron Mertens, CEO of DSGStorage Inc. A very high performance iSCSI target solution such as Chelsio’s, together with the best hardware and support infrastructure available will make for a unique offering for our channel and customer base.
By offering an integrated, high-performance iSCSI target stack, Chelsio is able take advantage of the price/performance benefits of volume server technology to provide Open-E with an range of options for developing industry leading iSCSI SAN solutions, said Krzysztof Franek, CEO of Open-E GmbH.
Chelsio was the first company to introduce 10GbE and quad-port GbE iSCSI/TOE acceleration adapters, and we’ve now delivered full target-mode iSCSI support across our product line of adapters and controllers, said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio Communications. Our second-generation products deliver record-breaking iSCSI IOPS performance and exceptional bandwidth capabilities due to our unique direct data placement capability, while retaining API compatibility with Chelsio’s complete product family. In addition, we have now extended our business model to deliver our technology to embedded applications.
Using its integrated iSCSI target stack and its range of adapter and controller options, Chelsio is well poised to address the variety of price points and applications which span the growing IP storage target market,??? said Tom Burniece, president of Burniece Consulting Services, a storage market analysis and consulting firm based in Los Gatos, Calif.
Chelsio iSCSI Solution Advantages
The Chelsio iSCSI stack is tightly integrated with Chelsio T204 quad-port GbE and T210 10GbE adapters to offer exceptional high IOPS and throughput performance, with low CPU utilization, for iSCSI protocol processing in storage target applications.
The Chelsio iSCSI solution offers several advantages over competitive products, including:
- Highly optimized iSCSI target stack providing support for discovery features including manual and Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS) support, security features including CHAP and Logical Unit Number (LUN) access control security, error recovery level zero (ERL 0), full compliance with RFC 3720, and interoperability with leading initiators.
- ASIC-based iSCSI acceleration, which reduces the burden of storage protocol processing from the storage host system. This includes header and data digest processing as well as direct data placement. This feature drastically improves overall storage I/O performance.
- Full TCP/IP offload including exception handling, which keeps the host system free from processing out-of-order and fragmented frames and improves the consistency of system performance.
- Consistent software architecture among Chelsio T204 and T210 adapters and controllers, which simplifies integration of 1 GbE and 10 GbE I/O technologies and assures seamless integration with existing storage applications.
- A rich roadmap allows for a follow-on release later this year, of the target stack which will include support for iSCSI ERL 1 & 2, and full support for Microsoft multi-path I/O (MPIO).
- Chelsio TOE products have already been tested for operation with open source iSCSI initiator stacks.
Industry-leading iSCSI Target-Mode Performance
To achieve the IOPS performance, the Chelsio T204 was deployed in a link-aggregated configuration in an iSCSI target mode server powered by dual 2.4 GHz Opteron processors, the Chelsio iSCSI target stack, and a RAM disk. The target mode server was connected to 16 Windows 2003 servers running the Microsoft iSCSI initiator and the industry-standard Iometer tool was used for measuring 512-byte initiator reads and writes. Measurements on T204 showed a bandwidth of up to 3.9 Gbps with less than 20% CPU utilization, using standard 1500 byte Ethernet frames.
For more information about Chelsio’s iSCSI solution, click here.
Pricing and Availability
The new Chelsio iSCSI target stack will be a standard feature of Chelsio T204 and T210 adapters and is available immediately for Linux 2.6.12 environments. Support for Red Hat 4 and SuSE Enterprise Server 9 environments is planned for Q4 2005. List pricing for T210-CX single-port 10GbE copper adapter is $1,695. The T204 quad-port GbE copper adapter lists for $1,495.
About Chelsio Communications
Chelsio Communications is leading the convergence of data and storage networking with its robust, high-performance and proven protocol acceleration technology. Featuring a highly scalable architecture, Chelsio is shipping 10-Gigabit Ethernet adapter cards with protocol offload in hardware, which delivers the low latency and superior throughput required for high-performance computing applications. For more information, visit the company online at www.chelsio.com.
###
Media Contact:
Tim Helms
Helms Communications, Inc.
925-606-6936
timhelms@comcast.net
Company Contact:
Randy Smith
Chelsio Communications, Inc.
408-962-3681
randy.smith@chelsio.com