Storage Developer Conference: Chelsio Showcased T6 Unified Wire Adapter Solutions Offering Fast Ethernet Storage Networking

At Storage Developer Conference, Chelsio Communications, Inc. has announced a set of storage demos and performance benchmark results which showcase how hyperscale customers can optimize application performance and ROI using NVMe-TCP (TCP Offload Engine), NVMe-oF (iWARP) and iSCSI technologies.

“The elevated performance requirements of emerging storage architectures necessitate superior performance from the networking technology for customers to achieve the true effectiveness of their data centers and the data they retain,” stated Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO. “Enterprises have been unambiguous that they want to deploy flash storage across hundreds to thousands of servers using the most cost-effective and efficient networking available to maximize their ROI. T6 Unified Wire Adapters provide such access using a variety of offloaded protocols to reduce CPU utilization, increase bandwidth and IO/s, and reduce application sensitivity to packet drops and jitter on the wire.“

“Continued growth of cloud and edge workloads are placing more demand on data infrastructure resources,” said Greg Schulz, Sr. analyst, StorageIO. “Fast applications need fast I/O and compute including server, storage and I/O network offloads to boost not only efficiency, also productivity effectiveness. TOEs are a great solution to offload core server compute freeing up those resources for other productive tasks like the value benefit GPUs provide in freeing up compute cycles through offloading graphics and AI/ML workloads.“

During the Storage Developer Conference, the company demonstrated the following technologies that illustrate how T6 Unified Wire adapter solutions offering fast Ethernet storage networking complement emerging data center micro-services application and disaggregated storage architectures in the company’s virtual booth:

• 100G kernel and user space NVMe/TCP using the company’s TOE for low-latency access to NVMe SSD storage.

• NVMe-oF network access to NVMe devices with industry high performance and low latency 100GbE iWARP RDMA.

• 100Gb/s iSCSI protocol offload-based access to flash storage with high throughput and IO/s.

The APIs for the above protocols have been the same since the first 10GbE implementation of the company‘s Unified Wire architecture and are expected to remain the same at future, higher Ethernet speeds, thus enabling the customers to leverage their software investment with the next gen of Unified Wire architecture. This continuity is achieved by T6 silicon‘s underlying data flow processor architecture which has not changed since 2000 and is expected to continue to scale to higher speeds.

In addition, the company has participated in a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session entitled No-compromise NVMe/TCP deployment using server storage I/O offload. NVMe is the industry standard high-performance interface for accessing PCIe SSD devices. NVMe/TCP extends NVMe beyond the confines of a PCIe fabric by utilizing a low latency Ethernet/TCP/IP network to attach NVMe devices. NVMe/TCP is unique in its scalability and reach, practically eliminating constraints on the architecture, size, and distance of a storage network. The BoF was moderated by Greg Schulz, independent industry analyst and author, StorageIO, and has included review of NVMe/TCP performance results using T6 Unified Wire TCP Offload Engine to illustrate the benefits in performance and efficiency of the new fabric, opening the way to unprecedented storage performance and scale. The session was scheduled last September 29.

Resources:
100G Kernel and User Space NVMe/TCP Using Chelsio TOE (technical brief)
100G SPDK NVMe-oF (technical Brief)
Demartek Evaluation: Chelsio Terminator 6 Unified Wire Adapter iSCSI Offload (technical report)
Windows Server Storage Spaces Direct performance with Chelsio T6 Unified Wire 25GbE (technical brief)