Acceleration Zone Switches / NIC

The "AZ," or "Applications Acceleration Zone" products from Teak Technologies seek to improve the performance of network access layer communications via end-to-end cooperative algorithms employed by both the switches and NICs. In brief, these algorithms provide a network overlay with multiple performance enhancing technologies designed to minimize packet loss and the resulting retransmissions that may occur over standard Ethernet links. Among the technologies noted by the vendor as employed by the platform include Priority Pause-based flow control, end-to-end Congestion Notification(s), Protracted Drop, and inter-hop mechanisms. According to the vendor, such technology enables the gear to perform at near line rate (10 Gb/sec) per port over AZ enabled connections with no packet loss; a performance increase of up to 4 times that of standard 10 G links. A STAC test published by the vendor noted peak throughput of 9.6 Gb/sec for accelerated communications vs. 7.6 without acceleration in an RMDS configuration optimized for throughput.

Target environments for the gear include traffic aggregation from blade/rack servers, block level storage (FCoE is supported), DB or compute clusters, and video (IPTV/cable).

Both the switches and the NICs are able to sense the type of connection on the other side and operate in accelerated or standard modes, accordingly; making them interoperable with compatible 3rd party NICs and switches. For the BladeCenter switch module (see below) in particular, the vendor lists NIC blades from Chelsio, NetXen, NetEffect, Myricom, and ServerEngines as specifically compatible.

AZ products offered by the vendor include the I-Series switch and NIC specifically for IBM BladeCenters; and the new Top-of-Rack stand alone 1U switch (the R3000).

The I-Series products include the AZ-10G switch module, with 4 external 10 Gig SR XFP ports, 2 internal ports for BladeCenter bridge modules, 14 internal ports for blade server connections, and 2 internal 10/100 ports for connection to separate management modules. The NIC is a PCIe 1.1 card with an XAUI interface that can be connected to any of four AZ-10GE and/or 10GE switch modules and ships with drivers for Windows 2003 and Linux (2.6.15).

The new R Series, on the other hand, initially consists of the R3000, a 20 port (short and long-range 10 Gig XFP and/or CX4 ports) stand alone 1U switch with support for link aggregation, VLANs, QoS and more. An additional feature, the Access Layer Virtualizer (ALV) enables the switch to serve as a host-proxy for all server and storage attach points across its ports.

Expected from the vendor are gateway appliances, which would connect to and allow standard NICs to leverage the acceleration of the other AZ gear (i.e., the standard NIC would connect to the gateway, which would then act as an AZ-capable proxy to an AZ switch). The Gateways are expected to be announced in the 3rd quarter of 2008.

The I-Series gear is available now; with the R3000 expected to be available in approximately one month (June/July). Pricing is divided between the device itself (with standard functionality) and optional software licensing to activate the acceleration features.

Visit the Teak Technologies Web site for further information.