Hit iWARP Speed In Networking, Storage, And Clustering Apps

NetEffect was the first company to offer the Internet Engineering Task Force’s iWARP standard implementation for 10-Gbit Ethernet (10GE). The company’s second-generation product, the NE020, continues to pro- vide the same high performance in key networking applications while reducing power consumption.

Thanks to NetEffect’s patented Virtual Pipeline Architecture, the NE020 adapter delivers the highest performance for the least CPU overhead compared to similar offerings today (see the figure). For high-density rack and blade computing environments, the NE020 is an ideal solution where low power is essential. An NE020 with a single CX4 port draws less than 6 W while a dual-port version uses less than 7 W total.

Available in single- and dual-port versions, the NE020 10GE adapter has 10GBaseCX4, 10GBaseT, and 10GBaseSR interfaces and an x8 PCI Express host interface. Besides the basic Ethernet network interface card (NIC) function, the heart of the adapter is its pipeline accelerated Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) offload engine (TOE). The adapter supports Microsoft’s TCP Chimney as well.

The NE020 also implements the IETF’s iWARP standard. It supports RDMAC v1.0. And, it allows direct placement of payloads into application memory. The NIC, TOE, and RDMA support storage networking.

Additionally, the adapter supports Net- work File System (NFS) and NFS over RDMA and Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) and iSCSI enabled on RDMA (iSER). The basic NE020 architecture is virtualization-ready as multiple virtual NICs are supported as well as multiple PCI functions and multiple media-access controller (MAC) addresses.

The NE020 is compatible with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (32- and 64-bit), XP Pro (NIC and TOE), and Vista (32- and 64- bit and NIC and TOE). It also supports Linux v2.6 kernels, including RHEL4, FC5, FC6, SLES10, SLES9, and Suse10.

The single-port adapter is available now for a single-unit price of $895. The dual-port version will be available in August for $1195. Volume discounts are available.