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TWST: May we start with a short introduction and history of Chelsio
Communications?
Mr. Naghshineh: Chelsio is the market leader in the Ethernet connectivity space
in the protocol offload and 10-gigabit Ethernet. The company has been operating
since 2001. We are close to profitability. We have about 50 people. Our
customers are the server and storage OEMs. The solution is either chips or cards
that go into various embedded or server and storage solutions. TWST: What do your adaptors enable and where do they fit into the ethernet
subsystems?
Mr. Naghshineh: We have three primary utilities for these Ethernet adaptors. The
first one is 10-gigabit Ethernet connectivity. That is basically the next level
up after 1-gigabit Ethernet. It allows obviously 10 times the data transfer
rate. It fits into a server that has to connect to many clients to open up the
traffic bottleneck into the server.
The second area is in the area of protocol offload. Once you start moving data
at 10-gigabit rates, the host CPU in the server is consumed entirely just
processing networking traffic, and there are very few cycles left to do any kind
of application processing, which is why you buy a server in the first place. So
by offloading the mundane and redundant tasks of networking processing into
custom silicon, we return their CPU cycles to the user, hence the associated
ROI.
The third area that Chelsio is focusing on is the area of fabric convergence.
Chelsio's products can run Fibre Channel and InfiniBand applications unmodified
on an Ethernet fabric. This means that you do not have to buy any InfiniBand
switches and adapters for your clustering traffic or Fibre Channel cards and
switches for your storage traffic. You can do everything on Ethernet. This has
many benefits. Ethernet is easier to operate. You do not have to retrain your IT
staff. You get to stock only one kind of card. You can run on all of your legacy
Cisco switches. And, in general, there is a huge ROI for the data centers. As it
turns out, our T3 ASIC provides a higher performance than both the current
generation of InfiniBand and the next generation of Fibre Channel.
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