Chelsio Launching Unified Wire Adapters Based on T4 ASIC

Chelsio Communications, Inc. announced two Unified Wire Adapters based on the T4 ASIC, designed for WAN optimization, load balancing, business continuity and wire analytics applications at the network edge.

            B420-SR

The Chelsio dual port 10GbE B420-SR and quad port 1GbE B404-BT Bypass Server Adapters are high performance bypass adapter solutions.

The B420-SR is a dual port 10GbE card with PCI Express 2.0 host bus interface and the B404-BT is a quad port 1GbE adapter with PCI Express 2.0 interface. The key architectural advantage of these bypass adapters is the ability to fully offload key functions such as TCP/IP, traffic management, packet analysis and filtering onto the T4 ASIC, thus relieving the CPU of network traffic and deriving a higher level of performance. The T4 ASIC-based Unified Wire Ethernet cards also perform inline wire-speed sniffing, tracing and time-stamping.

"We forecast sizeable growth in the number of 10Gb Ethernet deployments over the next year, in part driven by WAN optimization, load balancing and business continuity applications," said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. "Bypass adapters with strong offload capabilities should find significant success in higher-layer network appliances and network edge servers."

To help maintain business continuity in the event of a failure, the bypass adapters provide for the network traffic to flow out of the alternate port on the adapter, bypassing the problem server appliance and maintaining the traffic flow. In addition to maintaining business continuity, the integrated switch and built-in traffic management capabilities on the T4 ASIC can classify flows, redirect and reject traffic without host intervention such that the host listens on desired flows only. This selective bypass can be enabled on a per packet basis at line rate. The T4 ASIC also offloads TCP traffic completely from the CPU, enabling CPU resources to be used for application processing rather than network protocol overhead processing, resulting in higher performance of the entire system.

The B420-SR and B404-BT Bypass Adapters are available from Chelsio and its network of distributors and resellers worldwide, along with a suite of protocol software and drivers.