Chelsio Communications, Inc., a leading provider of high performance Ethernet adapters and ASICs for storage networking, virtualized enterprise datacenters, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments, today announced that its line of Terminator 5 & 6 (T5 & T6) 1/10/25/40/50/100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) iWARP (RDMA/TCP) enabled Unified Wire adapters have been independently validated as providing full support for hyper-converged Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) deployments without requiring Top-of-Rack (ToR) switches to support Data Center Bridging (DCB) capabilities.

Hyper-converged Storage Spaces Direct configurations use "Network QoS" capabilities to ensure that the Software Defined Storage cluster has adequate bandwidth to communicate between the nodes to ensure resiliency and performance.  The bandwidth allocation capabilities can be offloaded onto Chelsio Unified Wire adapters, bypassing the operating system and without requiring expensive DCB-capable switch hardware, thus resulting in dramatically improved ROI and simplified management.  Storage Spaces Direct test results using Network (NIC) and iWARP RDMA bandwidth, with and without Network QoS enabled in S2D environments demonstrate excellent rate-limiting capabilities of Chelsio iWARP adapters in converged network traffic scenarios across physical and virtual network ports.

Chelsio T5 and T6 iWARP adapters enable building very efficient, high performance, Microsoft Cloud deployments very quickly.  iWARP works with any legacy Ethernet switch, thereby enabling incremental Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct installations without requiring a concurrent forklift upgrade of the switch infrastructure, or the entire datacenter.  This ability to work with any non-DCBX switch, allows use of the most cost effective new or existing switch infrastructure with the least amount of support, while enabling an immediate plug-and-play deployment.  In addition, Microsoft's support of iWARP protocol since Windows Server 2012-R2 release, has allowed for years of testing for a very robust, tested, deployment with iWARP.

"Chelsio's T5 & T6 based solutions enable high-performance Windows Storage Spaces Direct installations without requiring a concurrent upgrade of the switch infrastructure and help customers to efficiently and cost-effectively scale their Microsoft Cloud environments to derive the full benefit of cloud computing," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO at Chelsio Communications.  "This announcement represents the unique value delivered by our iWARP offering to help customers simplify and accelerate their journey to the cloud."

"iWARP is the preferred high performance RDMA over Ethernet solution for Microsoft private clouds, and allows leveraging existing Ethernet infrastructure for hyper-converged Storage Spaces Direct without the limitations, complexity and costs of other RDMA protocols," said Daniel Weissenborn, Enterprise Architect at ClearPointe, a Gold level Microsoft datacenter partner.  "Chelsio adapters have proven to be zero fuss, high throughput and low latency, exactly what you need to fully leverage and scale high performance Software Defined Datacenters."

"Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct brings cloud architecture and high performance computing prowess to the software-defined datacenter (SDDC)," said Paul Schnackenburg, President at Expert IT Solutions, a Windows Server-focused IT consultancy.  "Hyper-converged Storage Spaces Direct appliances powered by Chelsio iWARP RDMA adapters greatly improve S2D networking and dramatically reduce the IT infrastructure total cost of ownership."

Additional information regarding iWARP support of Network QoS capabilities for hyper-converged Storage Spaces Direct deployments in a network switch-independent means is available in a Chelsio Technical Brief and Microsoft-published blog.