Chelsio Communications announced its second generation 10GbE TOE adapter with copper CX4 interfacesand priced at $795 in volume.
Chelsio’s T210 10GbE TOE adapters offload the CPU-intensive network protocol stack, returning CPU cycles to the application. The adapters have been independently verified to deliver 7.9 Gbps throughput while using only 50% of a single server CPU, double the performance and up to seven times more efficient than competing 10GbE NICs without TOE.
Further benchmarks have shown that for iSCSI applications, Chelsio’s adapters deliver four times the performance, at 1/4th the CPU utilization relative to basic NICs.
Chelsio also noted that Sandia National Laboratories, in a paper presented on July 27th at the Cluster Symposium 2005, reported that 10GbE with TCP offload greatly improved system performance in a study where they measured aggregate bandwidth using the TerraGRID parallel filesystem. Sandia tested the system performance using both Infiniband and 10GbE with TOE as the interconnect technologies. The benchmarks, collected using a cluster interconnected with Chelsio T210 10GbE TOE adapters and a Fujitsu XG600 switch, confirmed earlier results by Ohio State University and Los Alamos National Laboratory teams.
http://www.chelsio.com
- The 10GBASE-CX4 802.3ak standard, ratified by the IEEE in February 2004, provides a low-cost alternative to fiber-based 10GbE in data center and cluster applications. This standard enables the use of four-pair Infiniband electrical cabling instead of fiber for short reach, rack-to-rack connections up to 15 meters.