Chelsio 10 Gigabit adapter supports Microsoft TCP Chimney

Chelsio Communications this week started shipping 10-Gigabit Ethernet adapters that have a TCP/IP offload engine, or TOE, and support for Microsoft TCP Chimney.

TCP Chimney is Microsoft's architecture for enabling full TCP offload. Windows operating systems can use the technology to move network processing from the host CPU to the network controller.

The biggest benefit of moving such processing from the CPU to the network adapter is that it frees up the CPU to do other things, like application processing. Chelsio's adapters also free up memory bandwidth for application processing.

As Chelsio points out, the burden placed on the CPU rises as the speeds increase, and when you start talking about 10 Gigabit Ethernet rates, you're potentially talking about an awful lot of TCP/IP processing.

Chelsio claims that its performance tests show that its adapters can get twice the network throughput and eight times the CPU utilization from the servers they're in. For its part, Microsoft counts the performance and scalability of the Chimney architecture as "major successes" for Microsoft.

Obviously, independent tests need to be performed, but the idea of Chimney makes sense. Certainly, if you're at the point where you want to put a 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter into a Windows server, you want to make sure you're getting the most out of that connection that you possibly can.

Chelsio has been active in getting its adapters recognized. The company was part of a demonstration of IPv6 speed records last year and introduced Gigabit Ethernet adapters to converge storage, clustering and server networking.

Chelsio says it is licensing technology patents owned by Alacritech to provide the Chimney driver support. The adapters start at $795.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.