Solarflare Releases 10GbE Mezzanine Adapters for High-Performance Networking

Strategic Insights -

Solarflare, the leading provider of application-intelligent networking I/O products, announced the release of its 10GbE mezzanine adapter family to address the high-performance networking needs of customers using IBM and HP blade servers. The new adapters are designed to optimize application performance, maximize network resources, and minimize CPU utilization in scale-out computing environments such as high-frequency trading, high-performance computing, cloud, and big data applications.

Key Takeaways:

  • Solarflare's 10GbE mezzanine adapter family includes SFN5812H dual-port and SFN5814H quad-port adapters for IBM BladeCenter, and SFN5802K dual-port adapter for HP BladeSystem c-Class, which provide full bidirectional line rates of 40 Gbps and 80 Gbps respectively.
  • The mezzanine adapters reduce complexity and increase performance of high-density blade server environments, and when combined with Solarflare's OpenOnload(R) middleware, provide the industry's lowest TCP and UDP application latency.
  • The adapters support more virtual network interfaces (vNICs) and PCIe virtual functions (VFs) than competing solutions, and feature SR-IOV to accelerate guest applications in Citrix XenServer and Redhat Linux KVM environments.
  • The products consume fewer than 4 watts per port, half the power of competing solutions, increasing the power efficiency of the network and helping to save thousands of dollars of operating costs for a typical data center.
  • The SFN5802K, SFN5812H, and SFN5814H 10GbE mezzanine adapter products are sampling now and will be generally available in September.

Statistics:

  • 40 Gbps and 80 Gbps full bidirectional line rates provided by the dual-port and quad-port adapters respectively
  • Up to 50% reduction of CPU utilization achieved by minimizing network I/O bottlenecks
  • Estimated savings of thousands of dollars in operating costs for a typical data center
  • 100% driver compatibility of the mezzanine cards with the SFN5000 family of server adapters
  • Average power consumption of less than 4 watts per port across the mezzanine adapter family

Sources:

  • Solarflare (www.solarflare.com)
  • Marketwire (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX)