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Solarflare Demonstrates Leading Standards-Compliant 10 Gigabit Ethernet Solutions at Supercomputing 2008
Company to Demo First 10GbE Server Adapter Direct Path Acceleration on the Citrix® XenServer 5.0 Platform
Solarflare Communications, the leading provider of standards-compliant 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) silicon, will showcase its technology leadership with multiple demonstrations of the 10Xpress® 10GBASE-T PHY and Solarstorm® 10GbE controller at SC08, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. Solarflare will demo the industry’s first implementation of the direct path architecture for the Citrix XenServer 5.0, enabling applications running on a virtual machine to have direct access to the server adapter hardware. This delivers 10 Gigabit-per-second (10Gbps) line-rate performance in a virtualized environment. The power-efficient solutions will be featured at SMC Networks’ booth #1741 and Ethernet Alliance’s booth #2514, November 15-21, at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas.
Solarflare’s 10GbE vNIC architecture provides a simple, power-efficient way to make full 10Gbps bandwidth available to virtual machines. Building on its 10 Gigabit Ethernet technical expertise and past development for Citrix XenServer, Solarflare is the first to deliver support for Citrix’s direct path acceleration architecture. SMC Networks’ server adapters now support this feature, thereby minimizing latency while increasing network speeds in virtualized environments. The SC08 demonstration will show network traffic running through the direct path architecture over a SMC 10GBASE-T switched infrastructure with multiple servers.
Solarflare is also enabling two other demonstrations in the SMC booth, showing application acceleration for UDP multicast traffic and support for the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard. Visitors to the SMC booth will see an SMC 10GBASE-T switched server cluster infrastructure, using the Solarflare supported Open Source technology called OpenOnload. Available with SMC’s TigerCard™ 10 SMC10GPCIe family of network adapters, this delivers a two-fold improvement in UDP multicast performance and a six-fold improvement in message rates, a use case that is vitally important to data applications in the financial services industry. In the second demonstration, visitors will see the Open FCoE stack running on an SMC 10GBASE-T switched network where the server network connectivity and FCoE support is provided by SMC adapters based on Solarflare technology.
In addition, Solarflare is a principal member of the Ethernet Alliance and is contributing multiple technology components to the Alliance’s data center demonstration. Solarflare’s portion of the demonstration showcases a converged LAN/SAN 10GBASE-T network infrastructure, running both iSCSI storage and network applications in a virtualized server environment. The traffic and applications for the demo include streaming video across the network and live migration of the virtual machines while the network is loaded with both storage and application traffic.
Executive quote
“Enterprises and data centers are facing increasing demands with more users and transactions, advanced bandwidth-hungry applications and pressure to continuously reduce energy cost and waste,” said Bruce Tolley, vice president of marketing at Solarflare. “Our partnership efforts and demos at SC08 illustrate that standards-compliant 10GbE is truly an efficient and high-performing solution for driving the next-generation of network infrastructure. Solidifying our technical leadership and innovation, Solarflare’s 10GBASE-T PHY and 10GbE controller technology will continue to play an essential role in the mainstream emergence of high-performing, yet power-efficient and cost-effective networking.”
Customer quote
“Solarflare continues to make technical advances on the Citrix XenServer platform and we are excited to see the benefits and enhanced virtualization capabilities Solarflare’s direct path architecture brings to our solution,” said Simon Crosby, chief technology officer at Citrix. “With the emergence of bandwidth-intensive applications and the continued adoption of virtualization by IT managers, it is essential to integrate Solarflare’s architecture to increase network speeds and reduce latency between virtual machines and server adapters.”
About the company
About Solarflare® 10 Gigabit Products
Solarflare designs and develops the highest-performing, lowest-power, standards-compliant 10GbE controllers and 10GBASE-T transceivers on the market. Optimized for all key virtualization platforms including Citrix XenEnterprise, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, and VMware’s ESX server, Solarflare’s Solarstorm® Ethernet controller consumes less than 2.2 watts at full line-rate performance delivering the optimal balance in performance and power efficiency. Solarflare’s 10Xpress® 10GBASE-T PHY supports distances of greater than 100 meters on UTP Category 6A cabling, 100 meters on STP Category 6, 55 meters on UTP Category 6, and 45 meters on UTP Category 5E cabling. When combined on a server adapter, Solarflare’s 10Xpress 10GBASE-T PHY and Solarstorm 10GbE controller deliver 10 times the performance of a 1 Gigabit NIC at half the power consumption of previous 10GbE server adapters. For additional product information and pricing, send a request to productinfo@solarflare.com.
About Solarflare Communications, Inc.
Solarflare Communications is a semiconductor company delivering the next level of high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE). As the leading provider of standards-compliant 10GbE silicon, Solarflare’s robust and power-efficient solutions are cost effective and easy to deploy. Now real and ready for primetime, Solarflare 10 Gigabit Ethernet makes possible next-generation applications such as streaming rich media, Web 2.0, server virtualization and network convergence. Solarflare is working with key industry partners and customers to ensure interoperability and drive a complete 10GBASE-T ecosystem. The privately held company is headquartered in Irvine, California, with a development center in Cambridge, UK, and has announced relationships with Accton, Citrix, CommScope, Delta, Ixia, Panduit, SMC and VMware.
All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.
Contact details
LEWIS PR
Katie Eakins / Amy Robinson
619-677-2700
solarflare@lewispr.com
Supporting materials
To view Solarflare’s demo during SC08 in Austin, please contact Amy Robinson at 619-677-2700 or solarflare@lewispr.com.
Technorati tags: Solarflare | semiconductor | 10 gigabit ethernet | data center | 10 GbE |
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