Chelsio Delivers TCP Chimney

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Chelsio Communications Inc., the industry leading provider of 10-Gigabit Ethernet unified wire solutions, today announced availability of its TCP/IP offload engine (TOE) technology fully supporting the Microsoft TCP Chimney architecture. Microsoft TCP Chimney allows Windows® operating systems to offload network TCP processing from the CPU to the network controller. Chelsio is licensing Alacritech Inc. patents to enable Chimney driver support.

TCP/IP processing consumes a high amount of server CPU cycles and at 10Gbps rates, it places a tremendous load on the memory subsystem and the need to offload this burden from the server becomes critical. TCP Chimney-enabled Chelsio adapters not only free the host CPU from network processing, but also, by eliminating data copy, free up memory bandwidth for processing of applications, thus improving overall application performance and server efficiency.

Performance testing results show that Chelsio’s 10GbE TOE, running with Microsoft’s TCP Chimney stack, doubles network throughput and improves CPU utilization by up to eight times as compared to the same server running without a TOE. In fact, the utility cost savings enabled by TCP Chimney over the data center server refresh cycle are easily a multiple of the cost of the server itself: TCP Chimney allows more compute power for the investment for the data center managers. Further, Chelsio’s hardware offload engine also accelerates TCP/IP processing times, yielding better response times and no latency variations for networked applications – critical to the performance of interactive applications.

“This major milestone is the result of our long-term collaboration with Microsoft and supports our overall vision for a unified data center fabric,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio Communications. “Available today, our 10GbE Chimney protocol offload engine opens the way for broad adoption throughout the network, and has set a new standard for TCP/IP offload engine technology. Our T3 10GbE solution addresses the performance acceleration requirements of CIFS, iSCSI and general networking applications. The results are clear: using Chimney results in higher bandwidth, lower CPU utilizations, lower server power consumption, and lower latencies.”

Chelsio Communications Inc.