Chelsio Windows iSCSI Initiator

Chelsio Communications, Inc. announced its hardware offloaded iSCSI initiator driver, enabling 10Gb line-rate iSCSI performance over its unified wire adapters in Windows 2003, Windows 2008-SP2 and Windows 2008-R2 environments.

The iSCSI initiator was demonstrated this week at Storage Networking World in Phoenix, AZ.

The iSCSI initiator allows line-rate performance for standard 1500 Byte Ethernet frames with CRC-32 digest protection enabled, providing the same high-data integrity with iSCSI as Fibre Channel, without the associated high cost. With Chelsio’s hardware offload for the Open-iSCSI initiator in Linux distributions, this brings the Windows platforms to the same high performance and data integrity protection levels. The iSCSI driver release combines a crash dump driver and iSCSI Boot in a complete solution. Chelsio now has the first 10Gb Ethernet all-in-one adapter with such a high level of functionality.

In addition to iSCSI initiator, Chelsio is now shipping Network Direct support for high performance computing on Windows 2008-SP2 and Windows 2008-R2, as well as iSCSI Boot. A single unified wire installer combines Network Direct, NDIS/Chimney and iSCSI initiator, for all three Windows Server variants.

“The delivery of the hardware offloaded iSCSI initiator, Network Direct, iSCSI Boot, Hyper-V, as well as our complete Microsoft TCP Chimney support completes our Unified Wire goal,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio Communications. “Through a single unified wire, we can now deliver stateless NIC, TOE, iSCSI and iWARP clustering for data center environments running Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. Our customers can now completely future-proof their windows installations.”

The iSCSI initiator, Network Direct, iSCSI Boot, Chimney, and NDIS are available today from Chelsio and its distributors.