Cavium Line of 10GbE Intelligent Network PCIe Adapters for Appliances, Servers and Storage

Cavium Networks, provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, wireless, storage and video applications, announced a broad line of 10 Gigabit Ethernet Intelligent Network Adapters (INA). These adapters fully offload secure network services, compression, iSCSI and FCoE functionality from the host CPU to deliver industry leading performance up to 10 Gbps in Appliances, Blade Servers and Storage Systems. The 10 GbE INA families, based on the OCTEON Plus CN58XX and CN56XX processors, support fiber and copper interfaces in a single PCI-Express or PCI-X slot form factor. These adapters are being designed into a broad range of systems including L4-L7 switches, WAN optimization appliances, Blade Servers and Storage Equipment. Cavium will be disclosing details of these Adapters at Interop Las Vegas 2009 taking place on May 17-21 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.

OCTEON Plus CN58XX – Block Diagram

10 GbE Connectivity & Intelligent Network Acceleration
for Appliances, Servers and Storage
Processing requirements in the Data Center are increasing rapidly driven by applications including Cloud Computing, Secure ecommerce & Web 2.0. Additionally, there is increased integration of computing, networking and virtualization in a single system with needs for lower real-estate, power and cost. Furthermore, 10 Gigabit Ethernet is being increasingly adopted for network, storage and clustering IO connectivity. The Cavium Intelligent Network Adapters offer 10 GbE connectivity with leading hardware acceleration for Packet Processing, Compression, Pattern-matching (regular expression), IPsec/SSL processing, Firewall, Intrusion prevention (IPS), Anti-Virus, iSCSI and FCoE. Additionally, these products provide QoS capability that is essential for IO virtualization and integration of networking and storage data in a single Adapter. These adapters are programmable using standard C/C++ and operating systems which enable OEM customers to implement custom application acceleration features.

Cavium’s 10 GbE Line of Intelligent Network Adapters
The Cavium 10 GbE Intelligent Network Adapter family consists of two product lines, one supporting PCI-X connectivity and the other supporting PCI-Express.

Cavium’s PCI-X 10GbE Adapters are available in a full-height, full-length, single-slot 64-bit/133MHz PCI-X form factor. These adapters support the OCTEON Plus CN58XX processors with up to 16 MIPS64 cores, and include integrated hardware acceleration for TCP, encryption/decryption, compression/decompression, and pattern matching.

These adapters also provide a powerful set of features, including:

• Up to four ECC-protected Mini-DIMM slots
• 1x 10 GbE SFP+ port enabling copper or fiber support
• SPI4.2 connector enabling multi-card cascading — providing a dedicated datapath between adjacent adapters without utilizing PCI-X bandwidth

Cavium’s PCI-Express 10GbE Adapters are available in a full-height, half-length, single-slot PCI Express form factor. All adapters support the OCTEON Plus CN56/57XX processors with up to 12 MIPS64 cores, and include integrated hardware acceleration for TCP, encryption/decryption, and compression/decompression.

These adapters also provide a powerful set of features, including:

• Two ECC-protected Mini-DIMM slots
• 2×10 GbE SFP+ ports enabling copper or fiber support

Cavium Intelligent Network Adapters enable industry leading performance for a broad range of applications:

• Greater than 200K iSCSI IOPS
• Compression/Decompression performance of up to 10Gbps for GZIP, PKZIP and variant protocols with unmatched compression ratios. Compression ratios exceed 4:1 for typical web traffic, which are up to 2x that of alternative solutions
• TCP, SSL, and IPsec processing up to 20Gbps
• RSA Performance of up to 20,000 RSA operations/s
• IDS/IPS and Anti-Virus performance of up to 5 Gbps

Cavium Intelligent Network Adapter Software Support
The Cavium INA family is supported by a rich set of x86 host system software, including a portable PCI-X or PCI-Express driver with standard LINUX support and C-language APIs for offloading compression/decompression, SSL, TCP, iSCSI, pattern matching, and crypto processing.

For users looking to add proprietary processing features to the Cavium Adapter families a full software development kit is available. The Software Development Kit includes Linux, GNU tool-chain, GDB development environment and popular third party C/C++ tool-chain and development support. For data-plane applications a C-language thin executive is available to remove operating system processing overhead. Additionally, Cavium Networks provides APIs and production quality source code software toolkits for IPsec, SSL, TCP, Anti-Virus, and IDS/IPS stacks for customization. OCTEON is also supported by third-party standard operating systems from WindRiver® and MontaVista®.

"Cavium’s multi-Gigabit Intelligent Network Adapters have delivered leading performance and rapid time-to-market for a wide range of customers using x86 based platforms," said Rajneesh Gaur, Senior Director of Coprocessor & Boards Group, Cavium Networks. "Now with 10GbE connectivity and higher performance, we are enabling our existing customers to upgrade their software seamlessly. Through support of PCI-X and PCI-Express as well as copper and fiber interfaces, we address a wide range of applications and system configurations."

Availability
Samples for Cavium 10 GbE PCI-Express Intelligent Network Adapters will be available in June and samples for the Cavium 10 GbE PCI-X Adapters will be available in September.