SYSTEMS

Solarflare has announced the expansion of its SFN5000 family of 10GbE server adapters with the launch of several new midrange 10GbE adapters. The Solarflare SFC9000 controller LAN-on-motherboard (LOM), announced in August 2009, enables the product's low-power, hardware-assisted virtualization and aggressive cost performance ratios.

The SFC9000 is the industry's lowest power controller and the industry's first LOM with integrated 10GBASE-T. With its hardware-assisted support for virtualization, the SFC9000 delivers up to 5 times the application performance of other server adapters by accelerating virtual I/O for Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper V and VMware. The SFC9000 also possesses the industry's most scalable virtualization architecture, supporting up to 256 virtual functions and up to 2048 virtual NICs, 16 times greater scalability than conventional approaches.

The company's two new dual-port and single-port midrange 10GbE server adapters complement the currently shipping enterprise 10GbE server adapters, expanding Solarflare's footprint in the market, while offering customers better performance at more aggressive cost and performance points.

Midrange 10GbE server adapters

Solarflare's midrange dual-port and single-port 10GbE adapters deliver high-performance, low latency, low power and scalable I/O virtualization, offering exceptional value for datacenters, enterprise networks, virtualization and cloud applications, and high performance compute (HPC) clusters: SFN5162F Dual-Port 10GbE SFP+ Server Adapter, SFN5161T Dual-Port 10GBASE-T Server Adapter, SFN5152F Single-Port SFP+ Server Adapter, and the SFN5151T Single-Port 10GBASE-T Server Adapter.

"Our customers are very excited about our expanded 10GbE server adapter portfolio," Russell Stern, CEO of Solarflare. "Our midrange server adapters offer customers exceptional value. The power, performance and cost advantages are all possible because we were the first company with a 10GBASE-T LOM chip and have the lowest power PHY and the lowest power controller. We have the right feature set to enable high-frequency trading, high-performance computing for select verticals, such as scientific computing, oil, gas and manufacturing, as well as server virtualization for cloud networking."

Solarflare is the first and only company shipping both low-power, sub 5-watt 10GBASE-T transceivers and integrated, single monolithic 10GBASE-T LOM chips. Because Solarflare is the only company with the lowest power 10GBASE-T LOM, it is able to bring to market the lowest-power, single port 10GBASE-T adapter, at 7.9 watts, and the lowest power dual port 10GBASE-T adapter, at 12.9 watts, versus competing solutions at 20 watts or more. When a datacenter customer deploys 1000s of servers, the power savings add up to a quarter of a million kw/hours per year (2000 servers * 2 slots*7 watts*24 hours*365 days).

Solarflare 10GbE network adapters, often in combination with Solarflare OpenOnload application acceleration middleware, enable companies in a wide range of industries to build high-performance compute (HPC) clusters and datacenters that meet the most demanding computing and networking challenges. These include financial services, virtualized datacenters, energy, oil and gas and academic computing environments.

To date, Solarflare has shipped the SFN5122F 10GbE dual port SFP+ adapter to over 100 customers and 150 locations in China, Europe, US, India, Hong Kong and Singapore. The SFN5122F, with its OpenOnload application acceleration middleware, is also installed in every major equities exchange worldwide.

Pricing and availability

• SFN5162F Dual-Port 10GbE SFP+ Midrange Server Adapter. US List price $825, available now.
• SFN5161T Dual-Port 10GBASE-T Midrange Server Adapter. US List price $900, available now.
• SFN5152F Single-Port 10GbE SFP+ Midrange Server Adapter. US List price $619, available now.
• SFN5151T Single-Port 10GBASE-T Midrange Server Adapter. US List price $675, available now.