Chelsio showcases 10 Gigabit Ethernet in data centers

Chelsio Communications recently partnered with two other vendors to integrate its 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology into data center products.

Chelsio's collaboration with Penguin Computing produced an eight-node server cluster with IP SAN that the companies are selling for $30,000. The cluster contains 32 compute cores, 40GB of memory and a terabyte of storage. It can perform storage functions such as consolidated SAN/NAS, snapshots, mirroring and volume management. Also included are a keyboard-video-mouse switch and cluster-management software.

Linking up the eight nodes is a switch fabric using technology from Chelsio and Fulcrum Microsystems. The Fulcrum portion is a 24-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch chip, and the Chelsio part is the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Unified Wire adapters. The companies hold up the cluster as an example of server and storage network convergence, with everything running over Ethernet.

The companies say that the package is plug-and-play, and that there are 16 uplink ports for scaling the nodes up into part of larger clusters.

Meanwhile, at last month's SC08 supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, Fulcrum and Chelsio demonstrated a 10 Gigabit Ethernet network that merges the lossless traffic required for storage networks onto the same infrastructure used for lossy Ethernet traffic.

The companies say they used the same infrastructure in the booth to run high-performance computing, Web, multicast video, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, and other traffic. They were trying to show that Ethernet can in fact be used as a unified fabric to carry all sorts of traffic in data centers.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.