A product release that escaped my notice: Chelsio released it multi port Gigabit Ethernet adapters last week, its first venture into the lucrative gigabit ethernet market. Chelsio now has the two-port S302E and S302X adapaters and the Quad port S304E adapters. Chelsio mentions in its press release that it will target the storage network and the servers market and will target the replacement of infiniband and fiber-channel technologies with Ethernet.
This is an interesting and ambitious ploy, given the dominance of fiber channel in storage networks. I am not convinced that Gigabit Ethernet is a good technology for these markets in the long run, Chelsio's venture seems to be more to have some product base in this market. Moreover the cards are priced high at $795 and $1495 for the two-port and quad ports respectively. They come with Chelsio's standard TCP/IP offload and RDMA offload technologies, which again I am not convinced is required for Gigabit Ethernet.
I am also quite dissapointed at the lack of ingenuity by Chelsio, two-port and quad-port Ethernet adapters are already available from Sun Microsystems (Sun's product line in this area is available here). Using the same chipset technology but replacing a 10 Gig port by a few 1 Gigs certainly doesn't seem novel enough. Market timing seems to be poor since competitors like Sun already have a much cheaper version of these cards.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Multiport Gigabit Ethernet adapters from Chelsio
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
The thing about Chelsio is that they have full TCP offload engine. Other vendors only support stateless offload, e.g., checksum, LRO and LSO. This is the point they want to sell. BTW, I am not a Chelsio folk.
That is correct, thanks for the clarification. However, my comment in the blog was questioning whether 2-Gig and 4-Gig cards need full TCP/IP offload and other features that Chelsio provides. Are vendors willing to pay for the extra silicon to drive lesser CPU consumption in the network protocol stack for 4-Gig?
I really like your blog....
I agree with you. TOE is more suitable for 10G. I am still not sure if TOE will buy you a lot for these multiport Gig NIC's. But one thing about TOE is that, if you can offload TCP stack, you can think about one step more to offload more, like SSL. So for a secure webserver or something, probably TOE is a good choice.
Thanks for your comment. Yes, offloading SSL is very interesting, particularly because the 3-way handshake and hashing operations that SSL require a lot of CPU cycles. Definitely if a card offloads both the TCP stack as well as SSL, it would be a good proposition. I am not aware of a card that does both, but I know independent cards, which can be added in a web server for example.
yes, I didn't see SSL offloading on host NIC either. Foundry Networks has some SSL offloading gears, which offloads SSL processing to switches...
Keep updating your blog, man..:-)
so its means that the loading is far faster? is that it?
Post a Comment