Chelsio’s T520-BT is a dual port 10GBase-T 10 Gigabit Ethernet Unified Wire adapter with PCI Express 3.0 host bus interface, optimized for storage, cloud computing, HPC, virtualization and other data center applications.

The fifth-generation T5 ASIC 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.

The Unified Wire Solution

The T5 ASIC enables a unified wire for LAN, SAN, and cluster traffic, built upon a combination of high bandwidth and low latency architecture along with a complete set of storage and cluster protocols operating over Ethernet (iSCSI, FCoE, and iWARP). In parallel, operating systems and hypervisors that have incorporated native support for iSCSI and database applications are now supporting file-based storage protocols such as NFS as an alternative to SANs.
FCoE and iSCSI support in the T520-BT benefits from high reliability features that include memory ECC, data path CRC and T10-DIX in addition to the checksums and CRC available at different protocols layers. iSCSI and FCoE provide a transition path from legacy SANs to converged networks.

The adapter supports IEEE 802.3ad link aggregation/failover features, as well as patented inter-adapter failover techniques that make it ideal for critical network applications requiring redundancy and high-availability capabilities. T520-BT also includes an integrated Traffic Manager for robust flow control, traffic management, and QoS. T520-BT Ethernet-only networking reduces the data center’s cost in network adapters, cables, switches, rack space, power, equipment spares, management tools, planning, networking skills and installation.

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 8 Gbps Gen 3 data rate, the T5 ASIC PCIe interface provides 64 Gbps of raw bandwidth to the server. T5 also provides support for PCIe SR-IOV virtualization with embedded virtual switch.

Complete and Flexible TCP Offload

The T5 has hundreds of programmable registers for protocol configurations, RFCs, and offload control. The T520-BT can offload processing per connection, per-server, per-interface, and globally and simultaneously tunnel traffic from non-offloaded connections to the host processor for the native TCP/IP stack to process. The T520-BT provides a flexible zero-copy capability for regular TCP connections, requiring no changes to the sender.

Packet Switching and Routing

T520-BT integrates a high performance packet switch, which allows switching traffic from any of the input ports to any of the output ports (wire-to-wire) and from any of the output ports to any of the input ports (host-to-host).

Robust, Proven Solution

Subjected to thousands of hours of compatibility testing, over a decade of stress testing by several OEM test suites and production deployment in servers, storage systems, and cluster computing, Chelsio’s robust, stable protocol offload technology delivers proven performance in a wide range of environments.