The Ethernet Alliance is an important industry group dedicated to the continued success and expansion of Ethernet technology. It was created to promote industry awareness, acceptance and advancement of technology and products based on existing and emerging IEEE 802 Ethernet standards. The organization accelerates industry adoption and removes barriers to market entry by providing a cohesive, market responsive, industry voice on IEEE 802 Ethernet projects. As a member of the board of directors, Tolley will contribute to the governance of the Alliance and work with his fellow directors to set direction of the Alliance in order to fulfill its mission and objectives.

At Solarflare, Tolley is responsible for solutions and outbound marketing, which includes technical, event and partner marketing activities. Prior to joining Solarflare, Tolley was a senior product line manager at Cisco Systems where he managed the Ethernet transceiver business that included product life cycle management and he launched Metro Ethernet, 10 Gigabit and 1000BASE-T switch solutions. Formerly Study Group Chair of the IEEE 802.3aq 10GBASE-LRM standards project, Tolley has been a frequent contributor to the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standards projects. He holds an MA from Stanford University, MBA from Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley and a PhD from Stanford University.

The AOE was developed using a system-level approach, combining software and hardware into a single, plug-and-play solution that brings applications closer to the network to improve system performance. This architecture allows users to determine which portions of code benefit most from hardware processing, and which portions are most effectively processed in software on the host server. This approach allows users to optimize their compute and network infrastructure for their application processing. A wide range of applications can benefit from AOE, including those in financial services, oil and gas exploration, Internet, network security and video processing.

Solarflare is the industry’s fastest-growing 10GbE server adapter company according to Dell’Oro, and now has over 500 customers worldwide, including three of the world’s largest securities exchanges, major commercial banks, trading firms and hedge funds. Additionally, Solarflare products are deployed in major research institutions, oil and gas exploration, big data applications and virtualized data centers. Solarflare is working closely with a number of these companies on the development and deployment of AOE.

Solarflare is developing applications that will be offered as part of the AOE product portfolio. Additionally, the company is providing customers and partners with a firmware development kit (FDK), which includes application programming interface (API), libraries, documentation and support, enabling the development of third-party applications. AOE will be available to customers beginning in calendar Q2, 2012.

For pricing information and more details, contact sales@solarflare.com.

The test environment included Solarflare’s SFN5122F 10GbE server adapter utilizing SR-IOV (single root I/O virtualization) and running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 operating system on an HP ProLiant DL980 G7 server. The test results establish a new scalability SPECvirt_sc2010 record with 8956@552 VMs. This is an increase of 21 percent from the previous record.

The benchmark results highlight Solarflare’s SR-IOV support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor and for Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a guest. Solarflare enables leading 10GbE performance by reducing CPU utilization, increasing bandwidth and decreasing latency. In addition, Solarflare’s hybrid SR-IOV model provides direct guest access for application acceleration, while maintaining support of the management and high availability features of the hypervisor, such as live migration.

Solarflare server adapters provide the industry’s highest line-rate performance and most scalable architecture for today’s demanding applications. Featuring kernel and hypervisor bypass, the company’s products alleviate I/O bottlenecks and provide IT managers the ability to allocate server I/O resources directly to physical and virtualized applications.

The SPECvirt_sc2010 is a vendor-neutral benchmark from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp (SPEC) that measures the end-to-end maximum performance of data center servers used for virtual server consolidation. The benchmark uses workloads representative of server virtualization, including mail servers, database servers, applications servers, web servers and file servers. Scaling is achieved by running additional sets of virtual machines (called “tiles”) until overall throughput reaches a peak or workloads fail to meet required quality of service (QoS) criteria

Leveraging Sandy Bridge I/O integration using PCIe 2.0, Solarflare’s SFN6122F delivers over a microsecond lower latency and a 100 percent increase in message rate over prior generations. The server adapter also features hypervisor bypass using SR-IOV to accelerate guest applications and alleviate network I/O bottlenecks. Demonstrating proven UDP/TCP acceleration at customer sites for over four years, Solarflare features a rich set of stateless offload for efficient acceleration of the most demanding network protocol tasks, including iSCSI and RSS. Further differentiating its family of 10GbE products from competing solutions, Solarflare also provides:

• Network acceleration with full POSIX compatibility, requiring no application modifications
• Support for common system calls (e.g. exec, fork), demonstrating mature and robust experience in multi-threading, large connection-counts and mixed file descriptors
• Support for VLAN, teaming, failover and MLAG for redundant links and increased bandwidth, common features used in customer networks
• Hybrid kernel / user space processing, maintaining consistent context between user level stack and kernel
• Transparent control plane, requiring no manual intervention or new network configurations
• Best performance in STAC M2 tests, delivering lowest latency at high message rates, plus sub-microsecond jitter

The SFN6122F features driver support for popular operating system environments, including Microsoft Windows, Red Hat RHEL, Novell SLES, Microsoft Windows, Solaris, Mac OS-X, Red Hat KVM, VMWare and Citrix XenServer. The server adapter consumes less than half the power of leading competitors’ NICs at 5 watts, and in addition meets Energy Star^® requirements. It also supports Solarflare’s open source network stack OpenOnload^® that accelerates application performance and is fully POSIX compatible. Solarflare delivers a comprehensive solution set that addresses critical bottlenecks, moving applications closer to the network for improved performance.

Solarflare’s SFN6122F is currently sampling and will be generally available in February. A companion product – the SFN6322F dual-port server adapter – combines the high-performance features of the SFN6122F server adapter with precision time synchronization and will be available in the third quarter of this year. For pricing information and more details, please contact sales@solarflare.com.

• Low latency at high message rates. Solarflare delivers not only low minimum latency, but also the lowest latency at millions of messages per second, a performance point that customers routinely use and rely on.
• High maximum message rates. Solarflare delivers over 4 million TCP messages per second on a single port, more than 30% higher than the nearest competitor.
• Low jitter. Solarflare has achieved 0µsec (zero) in standard industry benchmarks, while the nearest competitor experiences jitter of greater than 20%.
• Application compatibility. Solarflare is the pioneer in POSIX compatible user-level networking, with thousands of applications deployed at hundreds of customers over the past five years of production shipments, including most major exchanges and financial institutions around the world.
• TCP protocol compliance. Solarflare is the pioneer in user-level TCP networking and is widely recognized as the industry leader in providing enterprise-hardened solutions. Solarflare’s TCP technology ensures robust network performance.

Solarflare’s OpenOnload is an open source network stack that accelerates application performance, while maintaining POSIX compatibility. Unlike Infiniband-based RDMA  (Remote Direct Memory Access) technologies, such as RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet), OpenOnload uses industry standard network protocols (TCP/IP, UDP), industry standard Ethernet networks, and is fully compatible with all applications. The latest version of OpenOnload features several enhancements, such as a zero-copy API that accelerates UDP multicast receive and TCP transmit, which are two critical bottlenecks high frequency traders are looking to accelerate.

The patents granted include:

• US Patent 7769923 – Interrupt Management for Multiple Event Queues
• US Patent 7634584 – Packet Validation in Virtual Network Interface Architecture
• US Patent 7844782 – Data Processing System with Memory Access
• US Patent 8005916 – User Level Stack
• US Patent 8006252 – Data Processing System with Intercepting Instructions
• European Patent 1787207 – Dynamic Resource Allocation
• European Patent 1891787 – Data Processing System
• European Patent 1966950 – Processing Received Data

Woolsey will be responsible for leading Solarflare’s strategic marketing efforts. He will focus on high growth market segments, including financial services, virtualization, cloud, high performance computing and big data, to build further brand awareness and support global sales efforts. Woolsey has led numerous marketing campaigns for prominent technology companies, including Intel, Oracle, Toshiba, Western Digital, Quantum, Fujitsu, Maxtor, JD Edwards, Mentor Graphics, KLA-Tencor and Cox Communications, among others. Most notably, he led the development of the “Intel Inside” brand strategy, which earned accolades from such publications as The Wall Street Journal and Advertising Age magazine, which named it “Marketing Campaign of the Decade.”

Woolsey’s work has also been profiled in Marketing Computers, Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Adweek, US Ad Review, Communication Arts and Graphis magazine.

Hyve Solutions’ bigD Series 8 appliance, a big data platform offering based on Hadoop, integrated with Solarflare’s application-intelligent I/O products, will be showcased at SC11, November 12-18 at the Washington State Convention Center. SC11 is the International Conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. The joint solution, to be sold through Hyve Solutions, will help customers maximize the value of their data and realize faster return on investment.

The bigD Series 8 platform enables customers to analyze more data, more quickly, and in a smaller footprint. In benchmark tests, a 5-node cluster completed a 1 TB Terasort workload in approximately 30 minutes and 16 seconds. The solution’s user interface by Zettaset, a provider of easy-to-scale, secure solutions for big data aggregation and analysis, has safeguards that provide service management, failover and restart options. Customers will have the flexibility to grow their infrastructure according to their needs, while reducing associated power, cooling and data center sprawl.

Designed to support high-performance, low-latency, cut-through application performance, Solarflare’s 10GbE adapter and software solutions dramatically improve network I/O performance. The company’s updated OpenOnload® middleware is specifically designed for high-performance networks and bypasses the OS kernel, enabling applications to increase their network load, thereby increasing performance and lowering application latency.

To learn more about the bigD Series 8 appliance and Solarflare’s complete line of 10GbE products, contact solarflare@lewispr.com to schedule a meeting at booth #5210.

Testing conducted by Solarflare[1] with its low latency server adapter reveals that significant improvement in MPI performance can be achieved with commercially available TCP/IP Ethernet products. Solarflare 10GbE server adapters attained 4.5μs MPI send/receive latency, utilizing servers and processors commonly available for High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters today.

Solarflare’s industry-leading 10GbE solutions require absolutely no host software modifications, specialized network stacks, or new network protocols, while operating over standard Ethernet and requiring absolutely no special hardware.

Platform MPI 8.1 is a high-performance, production-quality implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI).  It is widely used in the high performance computing (HPC) industry and is considered the de facto standard for developing scalable, parallel applications.

Solarflare 10G Ethernet enables HPC applications to leverage more compute cycles from multi-socket, multi-core servers. This results in dramatically accelerated run times and eliminates the need to rewrite applications or change existing Ethernet and TCP/IP infrastructures.

Social media and other data intensive applications are forecast to generate zettabytes of data residing in both structured and unstructured databases. According to IDC, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes)[1] in 2011. With advancements in data search and analytics, web object caching and search, and data retrieval provided by such technologies Hadoop/HDFS, MapR, Memcached, and PCIe based flash, customer applications are now inhibited by network I/O performance.

Solarflare’s application-intelligent 10GbE solutions deliver the lowest-latency and highest-throughput Linux kernel and Microsoft Windows performance. The server adapters also support the latest Layer 2/3 smart flow management features, which enable Solarflare products to intelligently match network performance through the server to the specific requirements of the customer. For example, building on the previous receive packet steering (RPS) and receive flow steering (RFS) work from Google, Solarflare is the first vendor to deliver Linux kernel hardware acceleration for RFS. Using accelerated flow steering, Solarflare 10GbE adapters uniquely match traffic flows deterministically to specific server CPU cores in order to optimize application performance.

About Solarflare’s products

Designed from the ground up to support high-performance, low-latency, cut-through application performance, Solarflare’s 10GbE adapter and software solutions dramatically improve virtualized network I/O performance. Its adapters’ scalable virtualization architecture supports up to 1,024 vNICs per port, offering the ability to parse traffic at Layer 2 or Layer 3, and consume less than 2.5 Watts per port.

Availability

Solarflare’s solutions are the most frequently used on Wall Street and are available through 36 VARs worldwide, and sold through Dell, HP and IBM third-party hardware programs.