Chelsio Bundled 10GbE Unified Wire Adapters and Storage Software

Chelsio Communications, Inc. announced an integrated solution comprised of special bundled pricing for its 10Gb Ethernet Unified Wire Adapters and Unified Storage Software (USS) to deliver a cost-effective, high performance storage front-end for the flash-based storage memory array market.

Chelsio was demonstrating its Unified Storage solutions with Fusion-io, Inc.‘s storage arrays at SC11 in Seattle.

Storage memory-based enterprise arrays are high-performance and power-efficient systems that can improve application response times and scalability throughout the data center. Chelsio now offers an integrated USS and T420-SO Unified Wire package that delivers a hardware/software combination enabling solution providers and end-users to leverage the price/performance benefits of flash-based arrays for data centers struggling with I/O-intensive workloads.

"With the increasing adoption of the T4 Unified Wire Adapters, the higher performance of storage memory technologies over traditional disk-based storage now provides concrete significance for IOPS and bandwidth-hungry applications for data center networks," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio. "We are pleased to offer an integrated USS and T4 option for enabling the best price-performance storage offering in the industry."

"Fusion-io shares Chelsio’s vision that flash-based storage memory arrays deliver the very high performance and power efficiency that can dramatically reduce data latency and improve application response times and scalability throughout the enterprise data center," said Tyler Smith, Fusion-io vice president of Alliances. "We are pleased to collaborate with Chelsio to enable this important industry transformation."

USS 2.0 is a functional, cost-effective software solution with a range of data management and high-availability services that storage managers have become accustomed to such as thin provisioning, snapshots, replication, and more. USS enables resellers and OEMs to turn any 64-bit Intel- or AMD-based Linux or hypervisor-based system into a complete enterprise storage system.

While software is one of the main components of storage system costs, with storage vendors often charging a premium for software features commonly on a per-controller basis. USS 2.0 provides an inclusive software stacks for enterprise storage, including features such as multi-protocol iSCSI, FCoE, NFS and CIFS support, snapshot, replication, de-duplication and thin provisioning, all managed through a unified web and command-line interface. The USS removes the premium cost of software, which significantly lowers the price per usable gigabyte.

Purchasers of one USS license will be entitled to one complementary dual-port S320E-LP-CR for the NAS/SAN target and four complementary T420-SO-CR network adapters for the client side. The T420-SO-CR is a direct attach, dual-port low profile 1/10GbE Unified Wire adapter with PCI-X Gen 2 interface. The USS 2.0 license is list priced at $5,810 for unlimited capacity and is available at normal discount structures.

Optimal use cases
for the USS/T420-enabled flash array systems include:

Flash arrays that are suited to meet the high-speed, low-latency requirements of virtualization
Flash arrays that can support entire databases, such as Oracle, IBM DB2 and MySQL for high IOPS performance (versus compromised approaches of using database metadata in flash)
The massive file systems used in HPCC, IP video, and imaging can migrate to flash-based storage for quicker time to market and a productivity advantage
Storage memory-based arrays that can deliver the I/O requirements for meeting scalable VDI deployment at a fraction of the acquisition and operational costs of alternatives

The bundled USS/T420-SO-CR solution is available from Chelsio and its distributors.