UPDATE: Solarflare Fires Up Second-Gen Network Adapter

The AOE provides users with an open platform for "on-the-fly" processing of network data, allowing users to migrate portions of their business logic to the FPGA. By processing data on the FPGA before it reaches the server CPU, the AOE reduces application run-time and decreases overall latency and CPU workloads.

"Many of our customers are building network-intensive applications that require extreme low latency. While microprocessors are continuing to expand processing power with a multi-core approach, there is still no other technology available to address their performance obstacles," says Russell Stern, chief executive of Solarflare.

The vendor's AOE Nanosecond TCP Stack (ANTS), which enables users to implement TCP-based applications on the FPGA card, supports low latency and scales to large numbers of TCP connections, while consuming less of the FPGA's logic and memory resources, Stern says, adding that Solarflare has doubled the memory bandwidth of ANTS over its previous version, resulting in a five-fold increase in compute power per rack unit, reducing latency and server footprint.

The product development was largely performed by Solarflare's development team of 22 in New Dehli, India, which the vendor opened in February last year. Crucially, Stern says, the second-generation AOE is half the size of the previous incarnation, which has opened up the vendor to a wider customer base that was unable to use it before.

"The 7,000 chip from our controller is smaller than the 6,000 chip, so that bought us some room; using more advanced TCP technologies that have a higher number of layers; using some pretty exotic routing technologies.... The size turned out to be a big block for a number of customers because the longer board didn't fit into some servers, so customers would say ‘We really like this, but it doesn't fit.' It's taken us some time to bring out this next generation because there were so many other things that we wanted to improve upon and features that we wanted to add... and our [addressable] market is significantly enhanced just because of the result of the size."

The new AOE also offers an open FPGA platform that supports applications developed by Solarflare's customers, partners and third-party developers, including access to board services cores; source code for the control plane; pre-configured PMA blocks and memory controllers; performant drivers for multiple operating systems and socket-based communication with host applications. "We've significantly reduced the time to go live... from the time when somebody comes up with an application," making it easier for developers to be first to market with their ideas, Stern says.

Solarflare has already rolled out the adapter to several early adopters firms that worked with the vendor on product definition and testing prior to its release, including low-latency infrastructure and enterprise content vendor Activ Financial.