Aug 18 2010
Solarflare Communications, the leader in 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) data center solutions, announced today significant proof points of its momentum and leadership.
The company is shipping the SFN5121T dual-port 10GBASE-T server adapter based on its 65 nm SFT9001 transceiver to multiple Fortune 100 customers. The company is also leading the industry transition to the next silicon process node. Multiple OEM customers are designing products based on Solarflare's 40 nm SFT9104 transceiver, which enables higher-density switches and adapters, and possesses a latency specification and a thermal footprint competitive with SFP+.
Today, IT and data center managers have a wide choice of high-density 24- to 48-port 10GBASE-T data center switches from several switch vendors, such as Arista Networks, Cisco, Dell and Extreme. What has been lacking however is low-power, low-profile 10GBASE-T adapters. Solarflare's SFN5121T 10GBASE-T dual-port server adapter, announced in June, is now available and currently under evaluation by several Fortune 100 companies. Combined with the availability of multi-core servers that can take advantage of 10 Gbps, IT and data center managers now have the products to build cost-effective 10GbE networks.
The SFN5121T dual-port 10GBASE-T server adapter is based on Solarflare's SFT9001 65 nm transceiver. At less than 13 watts, the SFN5121T is less than half the power of competitive offerings and the lowest-power 10GBASE-T server adapter on the market. It is also the only adapter on the market to support triple speed Ethernet: 100Mbps, 1000Mbps and 10Gbps Ethernet for broad compatibility with the installed base of Ethernet. Designed from the ground up to support hardware assisted virtualization, the SFN5121T supports the emerging PCI SIG SR-IOV (single-root IO virtualization) standard, and accelerates guest applications in VMware, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper V environments.
Solarflare is driving the industry transition to lower power, higher density 10GBASE-T by leading the industry transition to the next silicon process node from 65 to 40 nm. Solarflare is at least one process node ahead of its closest competitor, as evidenced by the fact that today OEM systems companies are implementing multiple products based on Solarflare 40 nm SFT9104 transceiver. The SFT9104 transceiver is a significant achievement because it enables even higher density switches from 48 to 96 ports in one rack unit and quad-port adapters. Also, the SFT9104 possesses very low latency and a thermal footprint equivalent to that of SFP+ of less than 1.5 watts in data center mode.
"Our OEM customers have very high standards and rigorous test procedures for qualifying chips. My customers tell me that in contrast to competitive solutions, they continue to be impressed by our transceiver's ability to consistently consume low power, while at the same time dynamically adapting to changing EMI environments or physical perturbations of the cables," said Russell Stern, CEO at Solarflare, "We have achieved the power, density, performance and cost required to accelerate the mass adoption of 10GbE. SFT9104, is by far, the lowest-power and easiest to use 10GBASE-T part for our customers to integrate into their designs."
Source: http://www.solarflare.com/