SCIENCE

Solarflare announced the release of its 10GbE mezzanine adapter family to address the high-performance networking needs of customers using IBM and HP blade servers. The SFN5812H dual-port and SFN5814H quad-port 10GbE mezzanine server adapters for IBM BladeCenter, and Solarflare's SFN5802K dual-port 10GbE mezzanine adapter for HP BladeSystem c-Class, expand Solarflare's ability to reach customers in scale-out computing environments such as HFT, HPC, cloud and big data applications.

"Many of our customers who use our dual-port PCIe server adapters need to deploy blade chassis in power or space constrained environments," said Russell Stern, CEO at Solarflare. "These are often the very same environments where low latency matters, such as co-located data centers built for high frequency trading and large, tiered, high-density server networks built to support big data, analytics and memory caching applications for Web 2.0 and social media. Now with the availability of Solarflare IBM and HP mezzanine cards, these customers can deploy their blade chassis in these environments where they need this lower latency."

Solarflare's networking hardware and software provides a flexible, direct model for accelerating applications, while maintaining support for network and operating system functions. Its new family of 10GbE mezzanine adapters reduces complexity and increases performance of high-density blade server environments. When combined with Solarflare's OpenOnload middleware, the mezzanine adapters provide the industry's lowest TCP and UDP application latency. Designed to optimize application performance and maximize the use of network resources, while minimizing CPU utilization, the dual-port and quad-port cards deliver full bidirectional line rates of 40 Gbps and 80 Gbps respectively.

To relieve network I/O bottlenecks and deliver scalability in virtualized environments, Solarflare supports more virtual network interfaces (vNICs) and PCIe virtual functions (VFs) than competing solutions. The products feature SR-IOV to accelerate guest applications in Citrix XenServer and Redhat Linux KVM environments. Application performance is also upheld in VMware ESX and vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.

The three Solarflare mezzanine cards are 100% driver compatible with the SFN5000 family of server adapters. The products consume fewer than 4 watts per port, half the power of competing solutions, increasing the power efficiency of the network and helping to save thousands of dollars of operating costs for a typical data center.

Availability SFN5802K, SFN5812H and SFN5814H 10GbE mezzanine adapter products are sampling now and will be generally available in September.