STORAGE

Chelsio Communications today announced its T3-based 10GbE adapters have been selected by Isilon Systems to provide the high-speed interconnect for its new Accelerator-x clustered storage extension node, which was introduced this week at IBC2008 in Amsterdam. Chelsio 10GbE adapters are the highest performing in the industry, and are designed for storage, server and cluster networking applications. Equipped with the Chelsio dual-port 10G CX4 PCI Express S320E-CXA Storage Adapter, the Isilon Accelerator-x enables customers to achieve unprecedented levels of throughput for their clustered storage network. "Chelsio's high performance T3 technology is an ideal 10GbE solution for our new Accelerator-x platform," said Sam Grocott, senior director of Product Management, Isilon Systems. "By combining Chelsio's 10GbE network interface card with the Accelerator-x, Isilon's clustered storage solutions are shattering performance barriers of file-based storage systems and providing next-generation networking connectivity to tomorrow's enterprise data centers." "We are very happy to support Isilon's Accelerator-x clustered storage platform. Our T3-based products are well suited for Isilon's clustered storage solutions as the T3 is specifically designed for storage applications where high throughput and bandwidth is required," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio. "Furthermore, T3 provides a platform for customers to converge clustered storage access with industry standard protocols." Isilon's Accelerator-x combines both Isilon's new OneFS 5.0 operating system software with symmetric multi-processing and the latest innovations in enterprise hardware -- including 10GbE connectivity, dual quad core Intel processors and 32 Gigabytes of cache -- to deliver an unprecedented 400MBps of single stream performance and 700MBps of concurrent performance. With aggregate system throughput of up to 20 GBps at one-third the cost of traditional storage systems, the Isilon Accelerator-x enables businesses to maximize the value of file-based data in the most demanding enterprise workflows and applications. Chelsio adapters are based on the T3 protocol offload engine, a proprietary third generation ASIC that supports a wide range of protocols, and includes virtualization and unique traffic management capabilities. The T3 engine transforms Ethernet into a reliable, high-speed fabric that enables the Unified Wire, simultaneous support for network applications that traditionally required different fabrics such as Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and Ethernet.