Chelsio Demonstrating 5 Million IO/s iSCSI Performance

Chelsio Communications, Inc. announced the extreme Ethernet storage performance capabilities of its 40Gb Ethernet adapters.

The demonstration shows company’s T5 cards enabling five million IO/s (input/output instructions per second) iSCSI performance for a cost-effective enterprise storage target solution built with volume, off-the-shelf hardware and software components.

Showcasing the iSCSI hardware offload capabilities of the T5 Unified Wire adapters, the demonstration shows how all-flash and hybrid storage array OEMs can enable such arrays with industry iSCSI target performance that is compatible with the existing iSCSI ecosystem and supports the routability, scalability and reach advantages of iSCSI. The complete firm’s T5 iSCSI benchmark paper detailing the hardware/software configuration used and results achieved is available here.

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iSCSI offload is especially suited for enterprise deployments:

It requires only software peers (that are supported in all volume OSs) and as such can be non-disruptively deployed in existing environments.
The second source consists of OS built-in software-only stacks. The enterprise customer will never be in a line-down situation because of the adapter hardware. It is therefore much easier to address dual source requirements.
It is supported in Linux (LIO Target, Open-iSCSI Initiator), FreeBSD (Target and Initiator), Windows (Initiator – the most popular iSCSI initiator in the industry), VMware, and other OS’s and distributions.
It is built on the TCP/IP protocol and as such can scale and route and handle congestion and network loss resiliently and robustly without needing special switch features.
It allows the same redline performance as other storage networking protocols such as NVMe or iSER, and has built-in RDMA, but it does so over the TCP/IP protocol (removing any challenges pertaining to TCP/IP ‘overhead’).
It does not suffer from interoperability requirements of fabrics-based storage protocols such as iSER or NVMe Fabrics.
It is a proven $3.6 billion market today without any technology adoption risks.
It runs at 100GbE and beyond, and will scale consistent with Ethernet evolution.
The CPU savings resulting from iSCSI offload results in an immediate bill of materials reduction in storage applications – same or more performance at lower cost.
iSCSI is mature, robust, tested, multi-vendor, deterministic, and ubiquitous. It has a higher performance than FC which it replaces.
It allows enterprise OEMs to consider consolidating their adapter vendor product line and hence truly leverage the economies of scale of Ethernet.

Company’s T5 adapters enable enterprise storage systems that are purpose-built to deliver optimized storage performance for various application workloads in mission-critical virtualized, private cloud environments. The efficiency of T5-enabled storage systems lets IT departments balance performance, capacity and features with game-changing storage economics. Firm-enabled storage systems also integrate into diverse enterprise IT environments by enabling SAN and NAS deployments from the same array through iSCSI and TCP/IP protocol offload for iSCSI block-level protocol, as well as NFS and CIFS file-level protocols.

“Our T5 Unified Wire adapters set a new performance bar by enabling a five million IO/s iSCSI storage target solution with very high efficiency,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO, Chelsio. “Our iSCSI offload technology allows 40GbE to completely supplant proprietary storage fabrics, without requiring the deployment of new protocols that force an infrastructure forklift upgrade. With transition to flash, all storage systems are essentially HPC systems and require offload technology to realize the flash performance capabilities and value.“