Solarflare Communications today announced a new family of 10GbE controllers, including the industry’s first 10GBASE-T LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) product. This new product family consists of the Solarstorm SFL9022 dual-port LOM, the Solarstorm SFL9021 single-port LOM and the Solarstorm SFC9020 dual-port controller. The products deliver unparalleled performance, including sub-6 microsecond latency, which is a critical element to high-performance, real-time applications, such as high-frequency trading. The controller’s low latency also improves response time and application performance in finance, biomedical, seismic imaging, rich media, Web 2.0 and cloud computing applications.

The SFC9000 family features a fully-virtualized architecture, which supports 10x the number of virtual machines and virtual NICs as leading competitors, and the ability to provision and manage IP flows to ensure optimal application performance and network resource utilization. The family also includes the world’s first fully-integrated 10GBASE-T LOM, which enables cost-effective, backwards compatibility with 1000BASE-T Ethernet and support for installed cabling. These are all critical requirements for broad-based adoption in volume servers. Solarflare’s controllers deliver 37 Gbps aggregate bandwidth and a full array of stateless offloads.  

The Solarflare controller’s low-latency can improve the performance of applications that use multicast, require high packet throughput, low-latency distribution of data, low-CPU utilization and increased scalability. These applications include medical imaging and seismic image processing for oil and gas exploration. Moving forward, the increased adoption of data and media distribution for interactive social networking and Web 2.0 applications in cloud computing will increase the requirement for low latency and real-time performance. Capital markets are also a key segment deploying low-latency network applications where one millisecond advantage in trading can be worth millions of dollars a year. 

 

“New data centers require technologies that can scale as application workloads increase, while delivering top performance,” said Mike Smith, vice president of product marketing at Solarflare. “Our new Solarstorm SFC9000 family does this while using less than half the power, enabling 10G Ethernet to be used in even the most dense server designs.”

 

“The Solarflare controller family’s support of 10GBASE-T is fundamental to the broad deployment of 10 Gigabit networking,” Mansour Karam, director, business development at Arista Networks commented. “The advent of cost-effective 10GBASE-T server LOMs is important to Arista because it will accelerate the adoption of 10G switches. When paired with Arista’s cut-through switches, the combination presents a compelling value proposition. We have seen sub-7 microsecond latency switch to server and sub-6 microsecond latency server-to-server with the Solarflare Solarstorm adapter.”

 

“This is the lowest latency and highest throughput controller we have ever seen,” said Gregory Lorence, head of product management and marketing at 29West, a leader in high-performance messaging software for the financial industry.

“The increased deployment of multi-core and multi-processor servers is driving the need for increased server I/O bandwidth and intelligent, flexible management of virtual machines that can make use of all that processing power,” said Dave Passmore, research director at Burton Group. “These factors and such applications as financial market trading and server virtualization are fueling the demand for 10GBASE-T and 10GbE products.”

 

Solarflare’s new controller family represents the company’s third-generation 10GbE products and features a number of market leading capabilities, including:

•    Less than half the power consumption of other solutions, resulting in lower operating costs while enabling 10GbE to be deployed in high-density servers with limited airflow and power budget

•    Support for 10x the number of virtual machines and virtual NICs as the leading competitors, and the ability to provision and manage IP flows to ensure optimal application performance and network resource utilization

•    Unmatched performance, including 37Gbps aggregate bandwidth and a full array of stateless offloads that are fully compliant with leading operating systems and hypervisors

•    10GBASE-T LOM, enabling support for legacy cabling, compatibility with 1000BASE-T and very low-cost implementations

•    Driver support for popular operating system environments, including Microsoft Windows, Red Hat and SUSE Linux, Solaris, VMware and Citrix XenServer

 

The SFC9000 family is sampling to OEMs now. For more information on pricing and availability, contact productinfo@solarflare.com. For general information and to learn more about Solarflare’s products, please visit www.solarflare.com.