Chelsio Terminator 5 Unified Wire Adapters Achieve Windows Server 2016 Certification

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug. 29, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Chelsio Communications, Inc., a leading provider of high performance Ethernet adapters for storage networking, virtualized enterprise datacenters, cloud service installations, and cluster computing environments, today announced that its line of Terminator 5 (T5) 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) iWARP (RDMA/TCP) enabled Unified Wire adapters have achieved "Certified for Windows Server 2016" hardware certification.

The iWARP standard enables building very efficient, high performance, Microsoft Cloud deployments very quickly.  iWARP works with any legacy Ethernet switch, thereby enabling incremental Windows Server 2016 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.

As a long-standing partner of Microsoft, Chelsio invests heavily in joint engineering resources and expertise to test and validate upcoming versions of Microsoft Windows software on Chelsio networking infrastructure.  Continuing on this long tradition of cooperative engineering, Chelsio is committed to delivering broad high-performance iWARP networking adapter support for Windows Server 2016 environments after Microsoft's general availability, as well as for Windows 10 Enterprise.

Chelsio iWARP enabled Unified Wire adapters power a range of Windows Server 2016 capabilities including Storage Spaces Direct software-defined storage, Storage Replica for disaster recovery, SMB Direct for high performance file access, Network Direct for Windows HPC deployments, hardware offloaded iSCSI initiator for SAN applications, and Nano Server for cloud applications.  In addition, Chelsio's concurrent certification for Windows 10 Enterprise, enables Client RDMA functions and allows the iWARP wire protocol be used on both ends of the wire to enable high performance client-server installations using RDMA over regular TCP/IP and using legacy switches.  This will truly enable an incremental install of servers using Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016, without requiring a concurrent switch upgrade.

"Chelsio continues to provide high-performance networking solutions that have helped customers 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 enormous value derived through joint collaboration to help customers transform 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 without the limitations, complexity and costs of other RDMA protocols," said Daniel Weissenborn, Solution Architect at ClearPointe, a Gold level Microsoft datacenter partner.  "Chelsio iWARP RDMA adapters have been proven to deliver the high throughput and low latency needed to fully leverage high performance Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct."

"Chelsio 10/40GbE Unified Wire iWARP adapters greatly simplify bringing RDMA to the software defined datacenter, through leveraging existing Ethernet infrastructure and maintaining interoperability with technologies staff already know, it offers the low-risk path for Ethernet-based large-scale Windows Server 2016 deployments," said Philip Moss, CPO at Acuutech, a UK-based service provider and Microsoft Cloud OS networking partner providing cloud solutions.  "Chelsio iWARP integrates seamlessly with Storage Spaces Direct, which is crucial to our cloud offering, and with its high performance and support of incremental Windows Server 2016 deployments, adopting iWARP was no-brainer."

About Chelsio iWARP
Chelsio's Terminator 5 ASIC offers a high performance, robust third generation implementation of RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) over 40Gb Ethernet – iWARP.  T5 delivers end-to-end RDMA latency that is comparable to InfiniBand, using standard Ethernet infrastructure.  Chelsio's iWARP is in production today in GPU applications, in storage applications as a fabric for clustered storage, for Lustre and other storage applications, for HPC applications, and for remote replication and disaster recovery.  It is a high performance, robust, reliable, and mature protocol that enables direct data placement, CPU savings, and RDMA functionality over TCP/IP and legacy Ethernet switches and internet with no performance penalties.

About Chelsio Communications
Chelsio is a recognized leader in high performance (10Gb/25Gb/40Gb/50Gb/100Gb) Ethernet adapters for networking and storage within virtualized enterprise datacenters, public and private hyperscale clouds, and cluster computing environments.  With a clear emphasis on performance and delivering the only robust offload solution, as opposed to simple speeds and feeds, Chelsio has set itself apart from the competition.  The Chelsio Unified Wire fully offloads all protocol traffic, providing no-compromise performance with high packet processing capacity, sub-microsecond hardware latency and high bandwidth. Visit the company at www.chelsio.com, and follow the company on Twitter and Facebook.

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SOURCE Chelsio Communications, Inc.

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