Chelsio Newsletter

Chelsio Update, September 2019

Chelsio and RedHat support IBM's contribution of SoftiWARP to Linux kernel 5.3. In addition, Chelsio exhibited support of the feature with its T6 100GbE adapters, at the recent 2019 Flash Memory Summit (FMS). Pervasive availability of SoftiWARP complements NVMe-oF (iWARP) and iSER (iWARP) and other applications as now any L2 NIC can leverage high-performance Ethernet RDMA.

Featured Solution

Chelsio T6 Cryptographic Offload solution can operate in both co-processor mode and Inline mode to perform computationally intensive cryptographic operations more efficiently than general-purpose CPUs. Servers see significant performance improvement by offloading crypto operations on to the Chelsio Unified Wire adapter. Chelsio's solution uses the standard crypto API framework provided by the operating system.

For example, T6 produces consistent 100Gb line rate TLS/SSL performance leveraging Chelsio's TCP/IP offload engine with many connections and with minimal CPU usage as seen in this paper. The solution supports TCP/IP and TLS/SSL AES/SHA processing in cut-through fashion to achieve optimal bandwidth and latency .

For IPsec based connections, T6 consumes less CPU cycles and provides consistently higher throughput across the range of I/O sizes compared to Intel AES-NI as seen in this paper.

The solution has been tested for inline operation, using TCP Offload or host software TCP (kTLS). It has been tested for web servers, VPN applications, data-at-rest application, among others.

New Products

• Chelsio demonstrated Soft-iWARP with T6 adapters at the NVMe Developer Days event. It provides the following key advantages:

o An L2 NIC can now run the iWARP protocol and leverage the high performance of Ethernet RDMA networking.

o Provides a simple path for transition of RDMA applications to the cloud platform.

o Enables client/initiator side applications like iSER, NVMe-oF, NFSRDMA, LustreRDMA etc. to cost-effectively connect to hardware offload-based iWARP versions on the target side.

o Supports the ability to work with any type of switch infrastructure, including non-DCBX switches, enabling a decoupled server and switch upgrade cycle.

• Chelsio released VMware Certified drivers (L2 NIC with SR-IOV and VXLAN support, iSCSI/SER offload Initiator) for ESXi 6.7

Recent Publications

• Chelsio demonstrated excellent NVMe-oF/iWARP (RDMA/TCP/TOE) capabilities over Nexus 9k lossy TCP fabric, Cisco's cut through switch with on-chip smart buffers using in-house cloud scale ASIC at Cisco's state of the art "NVMe-oF POC lab.

• Chelsio joined as a founding member of the HiWire Consortium for Standardization and Certification of Active Electrical Cables (AEC) to provide a full solution for layer 1 and 2 interconnect to deliver persistent and deterministic connectivity necessary for the next generation of data centers as the industry moves to 400G and beyond.

• Chelsio presented iWARP at NVMe Developer Days Conference 2019. It provides an overview of iWARP fabric integration in NVMe-oF (Kernel mode and SPDK) with various benchmark results. It also speaks about the latest NVMe/TCP (and TOE), Soft-iWARP and their advantages.

• Chelsio published 100G Soft-iWARP NVMe-oF performance results. With line-rate throughput and 1M IOPS, any L2 NIC can now run iWARP protocol. This results in significant acquisition and operational savings and can achieve adequate performance for applications (like iSER initiator, NVMe-oF initiator, NFSRDMA client and others).

• Chelsio published a paper comparing performance of T6 Inline IPsec solution with AES-NI. Chelsio's T6 low-cost Inline IPsec solution provides data transfer with high accuracy and speed without affecting integrity and confidentiality. With the solution already inboxed in Linux kernel, it is ready to deploy and use.

Recent Webinars

What NVMe/TCP Means for Networked Storage

In the Wild

Netflix Open Connect Appliances Chelsio Network Controllers shipped with Storage and Flash Appliances.

SMB Direct in Linux - A Microsoft presentation providing an overview and benchmarks for SMB kernel client in Linux.

NVMe/TCP needs good TCP network design - TCP Offload (TOE) devices could reduce NVMe/TCP latency.

NVMe Over TCP Will Take Time to Eclipse RDMA

Did you tune for maximum performance?

Line-rate filtering for all purposes

NVMe-oF with iWARP and NVMe/TCP - A Chelsio presentation at NVMe Developer Days Conference 2018.

NetApp All-flash filers deliver record breaking performance Using AFF A800 arrays and Chelsio 100GbE iWARP RDMA adapters.

400 Gbps Disk-to-Disk WAN file transfer NASA HECN team demonstrates using NVMe-oF and Chelsio iWARP RDMA.

NFS/RDMA over iWARP A Chelsio Presentation at SDC.

NetApp A800 benchmark Benchmark results using NetApp A800 all-flash storage systems having T6 adapters.

Comparing the RDMA technologies An SNIA webcast comparing iWARP and RoCE.

RoCE vs. iWARP An SNIA Q&A blog from the RoCE vs. iWARP webcast.

Comparing the storage technologies An SNIA webcast on FCoE, iSCSI and iSER.

FCoE vs. iSCSi vs. iSER An SNIA Q&A blog from the FCoE vs. iSCSI vs. iSER, a great storage debate.

Benefits of RDMA in Accelerating Ethernet Storage - A Q&A on different RDMA alternatives.

Case Studies

Regional Library System Simplifies Their Data Center with a Windows Server 2016 Solution - S2D deployment using Chelsio iWARP RDMA.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Improves Health IT ROI - Providing full support for hyper-converged S2D deployments without requiring Top-of-Rack switches to support DCB capabilities.

Chelsio Storage over IP Enable Data Infrastructures - Addressing the various application and workload demands by enabling more robust, productive, effective and efficient data infrastructures.