ACADEMIA

S2io, Inc., a leader in high-speed server and storage I/O solutions, announced that drivers for its Xframe 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter will be integrated into Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s Solaris Operating System (OS) for SPARC, AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon based systems. In addition, S2io will be working with Sun to deliver a TCP/IP offload engine (TOE) with RDMA functionality to enhance performance and scalability in intense compute/server environments. The industry-leading Solaris OS is designed to provide customers with a secure, available and high-performance platform for mission-critical workloads and key enterprise applications. Combining Xframe, S2io's 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter, with the new high-performance TCP/IP architecture in Solaris, also known as project FireEngine, will offer customers inherent performance advantages. "Working with S2io will help us to jointly address customer demand for higher levels of server performance due to the exponential growth of data," said Glenn Weinberg, vice president, Operating Platforms Group, Sun Microsystems. "Sun's work on streamlining the IP stack for Solaris 10, together with Xframe's 10 Gigabit Ethernet capabilities, will allow customers to benefit from significantly enhanced throughput, performance and scalability in their IT infrastructures." In high-end compute/server environments, Xframe's 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter can deliver up to a 6 to 8 times increase in performance, a 50 percent reduction in latency and a six- to eight-fold reduction in cabling expense. And since the Ethernet protocol is retained, no additional training is required for data center personnel. "We're very pleased for this opportunity to work with Sun, a company known worldwide for its innovative products," stated Dave Zabrowski, President and CEO of S2io. "This is another clear example of the growing demand for 10 Gigabit Ethernet and its unique ability to offer a clear path for server optimization while protecting existing data center investment." S2io will also be working with Sun to develop an offload engine with RDMA capabilities. The biggest bottleneck in data centers today is the interface between servers. This is caused by traditional bus architectures that require servers to place too many processing demands on the host CPU. Traditionally, servers have to copy data between application memory and the kernel, which can result in significant degradation in performance as the CPU becomes overloaded. Servers equipped with RDMA-enabled offload engines, or R-NICs, can share memory with zero copying and bypass the kernel, even from remote locations and this enables the servers to focus on processing applications. The result is wire-speed connectivity that will allow networked servers and storage devices to transmit data at rates exceeding 10 gigabits/second. Data center management will see dramatically reduced latency, exponential increases in bandwidth performance, yet they can still maintain their existing infrastructure because the network is based on the ubiquitous Ethernet protocol. Founded in 2001, S2io has locations in Cupertino, California and Ottawa, Canada. The company is developing 10 Gigabit Ethernet hardware solutions with requisite software that will enable OEMs to solve their customers' high-end networking requirements. The company's products are based on S2io-developed technology that will deliver new levels of server and storage performance, availability and reliability in data center server, storage and high performance computing environments. S2io has raised over $42M in funding with its latest C round taking place in June 2004. Further information on the company can be found at http://www.s2io.com/