* Chelsio's new Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit adapters
Chelsio Communications this week introduced a new line of multi-port Gigabit Ethernet adapters.
Chelsio says its Unified Wire Adapters are intended to enable the convergence of storage, clustering and server networking onto a single network. The company is advocating the replacement of Fibre Channel and InfiniBand with Ethernet.
This is a bit of a controversial stance. Fibre Channel is widely used in storage-area networks, and some argue that it isn’t going away, and there’s no reason for it to go away. Joel Snyder recently made the statement that “Fibre Channel is dead,” and explained his position in Deni Connor’s Storage Newsletter. Deni followed up by getting the perspective of the Fibre Channel Industry Association in a subsequent newsletter.
Chelsio says its T3-based adapters handle the most transactions per second in the industry, at 16 million packets per second. The company says the same driver can be used “for any host bus, any physical media, any offload protocol, and any number of ports and speeds of Ethernet.”
Chelsio sees its adapters as relevant to network-attached storage, storage-area network arrays, high-performance clusters, blade servers, video servers, application servers and Web accelerators. Chelsio’s new adapters are intended to reduce CPU use on the host system and start at $795.
Chelsio is also now shipping a two-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet storage accelerator with PCI-Express host bus interface and a 10GBase-CX4 copper connection. The adapter costs $1,495.
Chelsio cut prices across its 10 Gigabit Ethernet line. Chelsio’s N310E-SR 10GbE PCI-Express adapter now lists for $1,095, including optics. The N310E-CX PCI-Express adapter now lists for $695.
