Chelsio to Ship 10-Gigabit Ethernet Solutions for Blade Servers

Chelsio have just unveiled their T3-based Unified Wire Accelerators, expected to enable server networking, storage networking and clustering on a single IBM BladeCenter platform. The device has recently been approved for use with IBM BladeCenter enterprise servers.

The new expansion card, code-named S320EM-BCH, is a dual-port 10Gb Ethernet adapter that connects to the server via a PCI Express interface. It is alleged to offload TCP/IP, iSCSI and iWARP RDMA processing from the host system, thus sparing precious CPU cycles that can be assigned to other applications. The 10GB iWARP implementation is fully compatible with the industry standard and is the only one accepted into the Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution.

The Chelsio card can easily run InfiniBand applications on 10 Gigabit Ethernet and, if combined with the company's iSCSI target stack, it can run Fibre Channel applications on Ethernet. The device takes up only 16 watts of electrical power, which makes it the most efficient power solution of its type on the market.

"IBM continues to innovate and evolve blade server computing with the trailblazing IBM BladeCenter platform", said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio Communications. "With the Chelsio 10GbE Unified Wire expansion card for IBM BladeCenter, customers can deploy networking, storage, and cluster communications over a unified 10GbE fabric for ease-of-use, reliability, availability and performance."

IBM BladeCenter is the industry's greatest provider of blade offerings. Its portfolio includes five blade enclosures, five compatible server blades and five I/O fabrics with a common architecture that allows clients to customize the server according to their business requirements.

"Blade continues to expand the ecosystem of technologies and solutions available for blade customers", said Doug Balog, vice president of development for IBM BladeCenter. "The new 10GbE Unified Wire expansion card built by Chelsio for IBM BladeCenter enables blade customers to build flexible I/O networks utilizing a 10GbE-based unifying fabric for clustering, storage and networking."