MOVIES

Chelsio's Terminator 3 ASIC Enables Storage, Clustering and Networking Applications To Converge Onto a Single Unified Fabric: Chelsio Communications today announced its third generation Ethernet protocol acceleration engine, the first silicon in the industry that integrates NIC, iSCSI, RDMA and TOE with wire virtualization functionality to enable convergence of storage, clustering, and networking applications onto a single unified fabric. The Terminator 3 (T3) ASIC maintains Chelsio's performance leadership by delivering the industry's lowest latency and highest bandwidth, with full wire-rate 10Gbps at less than 5% CPU utilization. T3 combines NIC, iSCSI Target and Initiator, industry standard iWARP RDMA, and TOE functionalities with integrated dual 1 GbpE / 10GbpE ports and both native PCI-Express and PCI-X 2.0 / 1.0 (266 / 133 MHz) host bus interfaces. As such, it is capable of running unmodified InfiniBand and FibreChannel applications with lower latency and higher bandwidth, all the while delivering a lower total cost of ownership solution to the end user. "T3 captures the critical features for fabric convergence and beyond, to mark the point where 10G enters the mass adoption phase with Ethernet becoming the unifying fabric," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio. "While our current technology already allows for cheaper SAN implementations compared to FibreChannel, T3 achieves higher performance and lower total cost of ownership in storage and clustering applications on the whole, compared to both InfiniBand and FibreChannel. The T3 technology effectively turns Ethernet into a traffic-managed reliable fabric, with low CPU utilization. We are in effect delivering a 'Hyper Ethernet,' with never before seen capability that is generations ahead of other players in the market." "Today's advanced digital newsrooms and collaborative post production environments require real-time, high-bandwidth connectivity across a broad range of content creation and shared storage systems. Avid's ability to deliver this performance within an end-to-end workflow is a significant differentiator for our systems," said Mike Rockwell, chief technology officer for Avid Technology, Inc. "With the capability to transfer data at very high speeds across a variety of networking interfaces, Chelsio's T3 ASIC has the potential to significantly lower the cost of CPU overhead in media production environments and simplify integration with standard IT infrastructures. Acceleration of a single connection to line rate also has the potential to enable high-bandwidth workflows that are currently only possible using Fibre Channel." "Chelsio has established itself as the leading vendor of 10Gb Ethernet adapters with stateful protocol offloads, and is still today the only adapter vendor to successfully deliver 10Gb Ethernet iSCSI HBAs. With the arrival of the T3 ASIC, Chelsio has significantly broadened its market opportunities by enabling the convergence of storage, clustering and networking onto a single unified fabric," said Bob Wheeler, senior analyst for The Linley Group (Mountain View, CA). T3 introduces remote management and value added features, such as traffic management, line rate traffic classification and filtering, and virtualization on top of the core offload technology. These unique features enable the use of T3 in various embedded applications such as blade servers, video servers, application gateways and performance proxies, server and storage virtualization, SAN arrays, and NAS filers. T3 is sampling now and will be available in volume shipments in Q4. The silicon is currently list priced at $295 for 10GbE and $175 for GbE applications.