Solarflare has announced the release of its 10GbE mezzanine adapter family for users of IBM and HP blade servers. The launch of the SFN5812H dual-port and SFN5814H quad-port 10GbE mezzanine server adapters for IBM BladeCenter, and the SFN5802K dual-port 10GbE mezzanine adapter for HP BladeSystem c-Class, mean that Solarflare are better equipped to service customers in scale-out computing environments such as those found in high-frequency trading.
According to Solarflare, the new range of mezzanine adapters reduce complexity and increase performance in high-density blade server environments. In addition, when they are paired with the company’s OpenOnload middleware, the adapters deliver bidirectional line rates of 40 Gbps for the dual-port and 80 Gbps for the quad-port, the lowest TCP and UDP application latency in the industry.
The new products are also set up to support a wide range of virtual network interfaces and PCIe virtual functions, thereby relieving network I/O bottlenecks and delivering scalability in virtualised environments. SR-IOV is featured to accelerate guest applications in Citrix XenServer and Redhat Linux KVM environments. Application performance is also upheld in VMware ESX and vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.
"Many of our customers who use our dual-port PCIe server adapters need to deploy blade chassis in power or space constrained environments. These are often the very same environments where low latency matters, such as co-located data centres built for high frequency trading."
Along with the performance enhancements, the new mezzanine cards are fully driver compatible with the SFN5000 family of server adapters and consume less than four watts per port in operation. Solarflare states that this power consumption is half that of competing solutions, leading to considerable reductions in operating costs.
Commenting on the new offering, Solarflare CEO Russell Stern said: "Many of our customers who use our dual-port PCIe server adapters need to deploy blade chassis in power or space constrained environments. These are often the very same environments where low latency matters, such as co-located data centres built for high frequency trading and large, tiered, high-density server networks built to support big data, analytics and memory caching applications for Web 2.0 and social media. Now with the availability of Solarflare IBM and HP mezzanine cards, these customers can deploy their blade chassis in these environments where they need this lower latency."