Chelsio T540-CR 4-Port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter Card - Part ID: T540-CR

Chelsio’s T540-CR is a quad port 10 Gigabit Ethernet Unified Wire adapter with a PCI Express 3.0 host bus interface, optimized for cloud computing, HPC virtualization, storage, and other data center applications. Since the Host Bus Interface is PCI Express 3.0, this card can support all 4 10G ports running at line-rate.

The fifth-generation (T5) technology from Chelsio provides the highest 10GbE performance in the industry and dramatically lowers host-system CPU communications overhead with on-board hardware that offloads TCP/IP, iSCSI, FCoE and iWARP RDMA processing from the 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 T540-CR enables a unified wire for LAN, SAN, and cluster traffic, made possible by the high bandwidth and low latency characteristics, combined with storage and cluster protocols operating over Ethernet (iSCSI, FCoE, and iWARP). T5 based adapters such as the T540-CR support both file and block based storage protocols and are ideal for building high performance SAN and NAS solutions. With both iSCSI and FCoE offload, FC applications can run natively over Ethernet, while taking advantage of its performance benefits and economies of scale. T5 also offers an ultra-low latency RDMA over Ethernet (iWARP) interface, making the T540-CR a competitive drop-in replacement for InfiniBand in high performance computing applications. It is supported in the same standard software distributions and allows running IB applications unmodified.

T540-CR integrates a full-fledged hardware Traffic manager for robust flow control, traffic management, and predictable QoS. 

The adapter’s four ports and IEEE 802.3ad link aggregation, and port-to-port and adapter-to-adapter failover features are ideal for critical network applications that require redundancy and high-availability capabilities.

T540-CR Ethernet-only unified networking reduces the data center’s cost in adapters, cables, switches, rack space, power, equipment spares, management tools, planning, installation and operation.