Chelsio Communications announced availability of its T3-based Unified Wire Accelerators, which enable server networking, storage networking and clustering on a single platform. The Unified Wire interconnect solution has been qualified by industry organization Blade.org for use with IBM BladeCenter enterprise servers.

The S320em-bc from Chelsio, an active Blade.org member, is a dual-port 10Gb Ethernet adapter with PCI Express interface optimized for storage applications. The T3-based card offloads TCP/IP, iSCSI and iWARP RDMA processing from the host system, freeing up host CPU cycles for other applications. Chelsio's 10Gb iWARP adapter is the only one in the industry accepted into the Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution. As such, this card can run InfiniBand applications on Ethernet. Further, when combined with Chelsio's commercial grade iSCSI target stack, it can run Fibre Channel applications on Ethernet. The adapter consumes only 16W, making it also the lowest power solution of its type in the market.

The S320em-bc offers an integrated traffic manager and classification engine. It can shape and pace traffic on a per connection basis or per class basis for such applications as video on demand, converged clustering and storage traffic. It can further examine traffic at line rate and compare against tens of thousands of rules using bitwise masks and wild cards for use in firewall and sniffing applications. T3 further offers integrated virtualization facilities that allow running of multiple guest operating systems on the same card. The above facilities can be further combined with each other to allow a host of traffic engineering features unique to T3.

"Blade.org is proud to have Chelsio deliver its 10Gb Ethernet accelerator technology as part of IBM's growing BladeCenter solutions," said Doug Balog, chairman for Blade.org. "Chelsio is one of the leading 10Gb Ethernet adapter companies, and we share a vision of accelerating the adoption of server blades in the mainstream marketplace."

"We are excited to have our T3-based adapters available today for the IBM BladeCenter," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio. "Our Unified Wire is the highest performance 10GB Ethernet interface technology available and it enables the convergence of storage, clustering, and server networking applications onto a single unified fabric. The additional traffic management, classification, and virtualization functions will further relieve the host CPU of the burden of all byte-touching operations at 10GbE."

The S320em-bc is list priced at $895 and is available from Bell Microproducts, Chelsio's distribution partner.