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.