Chelsio Demonstrated 100Gb iSCSI Performance

Chelsio Communications, Inc. announced the performance iSCSI Ethernet storage offload capabilities of its line of T6 100GbE Unified Wire adapters at SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference on September 11-14 in Santa Clara, CA.

The demonstration showed the company’s T6 dual-port 100GbE iSCSI offload adapters deliver 100Gb/s line-rate and 2.9 million IO/s at 4KB I/O size enabling iSCSI enterprise storage target solutions to deliver performance built with volume, off-the-shelf hardware and software components. With half of the processing resources of iSCSI target systems available even at maximum performance, latency delta of only 15µs between remote and local storage access, and a power rating of 20W, T6 adapters provides performance and efficiency gains to datacenters with power hungry applications.

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Showcasing the iSCSI hardware offload capabilities of the T6 Unified Wire adapters, the demonstration showed how all-flash and hybrid storage array OEMs can enable such arrays with high performance iSCSI target capability that is compatible with the existing iSCSI ecosystem and supports the routability, scalability and reach advantages of iSCSI.

The complete T6 iSCSI benchmark paper detailing the hardware/software configuration used and results achieved is available.

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The T6 100G Unified Wire adapters enable enterprise storage systems that are purpose-built to deliver storage performance for various application workloads in mission-critical virtualized, private cloud environments. The efficiency of T6-enabled storage systems lets IT departments balance performance, capacity and features with game-changing storage economics. The firm’s enabled storage systems also integrate into diverse enterprise IT environments by enabling SAN and NAS deployments from the same array through iSCSI and TCP/IP protocol offload for iSCSI block-level protocol, as well as NFS and CIFS file-level protocols.

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“With the explosive growth in all-flash storage arrays the network is becoming a bottleneck,” said Seamus Crehan, president, Crehan Research, Inc. “Chelsio’s T6 100G Unified Wire solution with iSCSI offload alleviates this bottleneck with both high-throughput and IO/s enabling high-performance low-latency access to flash storage.“

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“Our T6 Unified Wire adapters establish a groundbreaking performance bar for Ethernet storage by enabling a 100 Gbps line-rate and extreme IO/s performance for highly efficient iSCSI storage target solutions,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO, Chelsio. “T6 storage protocol offload technology allows 100 GbE iSCSI to completely supersede proprietary storage fabrics, while enabling concurrent, future-proof deployment of new Ethernet storage protocols without forcing an infrastructure forklift upgrade. With transition to all-flash arrays, all storage systems are essentially HPC systems and require offload technology to realize the flash performance capabilities and value.“