Chelsio ships Unified Storage Router

Chelsio Communications last week shipped its Unified Storage Router, a router that combines 10 Gigabit iSCSI and Fibre Channel.

The router is targeted at those larger businesses that already have Fibre Channel storage-area networks and are looking to extend the network to Ethernet-connected servers. It has two ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, two ports of Gigabit Ethernet and four ports of 8Gbps Fibre Channel. It supports Multi-Path I/O for iSCSI clients and Fibre Channel storage. Features include Web-based management, and hardware-based iSCSI acceleration. Chelsio also points out that server operating systems have recently adopted iSCSI offload technology. 

Atrato is using the USR-1000 router and Chelsio’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters to connect its Velocity1000 storage system, which is designed for entertainment, Web 2.0, video-on-demand and high-performance computing applications – focusing on high-speed, high-volume uses. Atrato says the system contains 160 identical hard drives, terabytes of SSDs and acceleration features.

Chelsio says that both its new router and its adapters incorporate its T3 protocol-offload engine. The ASIC takes on the processing for a range of network protocols, and is able to help with virtualization and traffic management as well. The company says the T3 engine is a technology that allows users to combine Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and Ethernet onto an Ethernet network, which is the goal of many networking vendors that touch on the data center these days.

Chelsio was an early proponent of the concept of putting storage, clustering and server networking onto the same Ethernet network. Two years ago, such assertions caused quite a stir, but today the idea is widely accepted.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.