Chelsio's T540-LP-CR is a quad port low profile, 10 Gigabit Ethernet Unified Wire adapter with a PCI Express 3.0 host bus interface. The adapter is optimized for storage, cloud computing, HPC, virtualization and other datacenter applications.

This adapter, based on the fifth generation (T5) technology from Chelsio provides the highest performance available and dramatically lowers host-system CPU communications overhead with on-board hardware that offloads TCP/IP, iSCSI, FCoE and iWARP RDMA processing from its host system and frees up host CPU cycles for other applications. As a result, the system benefits from higher bandwidth, lower latency and reduced power consumption.

A large portion of offloads enabled by T540-LP-CR are based on standard TCP, IP, UDP protocols (such as iSCSI and iWARP), and thus can operate with a software peer, or be replaced with a software solution at lower performance, thus providing the requisite reliability for enterprise customers, and allowing incremental installs in the datacenter. It will work with any legacy switch infrastructure and does not rely on new features such as DCB, PFC, ETS, etc.

T540-LP-CR supports IEEE standards-based link aggregation/failover features, as well as inter-adapter failover techniques that make it ideal for critical network applications requiring redundancy and high-availability capabilities. It also includes an integrated Traffic Manager and a built-in eSwitch for robust network traffic flow control, traffic classifier, load balancer, firewall capabilities at the port level.

FCoE and iSCSI support in T540-LP-CR benefit from high reliability features that include memory ECC, data path CRC and T10-DIX offload, in addition to the checksums and CRC available at different protocols layers. High performance iSCSI and FCoE provide a drop-in replacement upgrade from legacy SANs to converged networks.

The Unified Wire Solution

The T540-LP-CR enables a unified wire for LAN, SAN and cluster applications, built upon a high bandwidth and low latency architecture along with a complete set of storage and cluster protocols operating over Ethernet (iSCSI, NVMe-oF, FCoE and iWARP). A unified wire means having the ability to utilize all offload or non-offload protocols at the same time, over the same link, using the exact same firmware, host software, and adapter. Thus, a given system using T540-LP-CR can be easily targeted at different vertical markets and a variety of useful functions enabled (i.e. dial the bandwidth to a given application and assign access control, while offloading only part of the traffic). The Ethernet-only networking thus reduces the infrastructure costs in network adapters, cables, switches, rack space, power, equipment spares, management tools, planning, networking staff and installation.

T5 - Fifth-Generation Protocol Offload Engine

The T5 is Chelsio's fifth-generation TCP offload (TOE) design, fourth-generation iSCSI design, and third-generation iWARP (RDMA) implementation. With support for the 8GT/s PCIe Gen 3 data rate, it provides 64 Gbps of raw bandwidth to the server. It also provides support for PCIe SR-IOV virtualization with embedded virtual switch.