Solarflare Unveils Latest Generation of Ethernet Adapters for Scaling Mission-Critical Data Centers

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As the market leader in application-intelligent networking solutions, Solarflare has always been one step ahead of the competition in providing the best low latency, Onload®, high packet capture adapter solutions. This week Solarflare has innovated its networking solutions even further, with the release of its next generation of 10/40 Gb ethernet platforms.

Meet the New Flareon® Family

Powered by a configurable suite of software options, the Flareon Ultra SFN8500 family of Ethernet adapters is designed to accelerate, monitor and secure scaling flow-aware, cloud-based data center environments. Added to the 7000 series already impressive low latency capabilities, the 8000 series offers even more acceleration capabilities, along with enhanced security features that offer additional protection at the Network Interface level including:

  • Ultra-low sub-microsecond latency with Onload kernel bypass
  • Class leading clock synchronization accuracy and hardware time stamping
  • Scalable, High-Performance Virtualization with 2048 vNICs, SR-IOV, overlay network acceleration e.g. VXLAN, NVGRE

This latest generation of adapters has been designed for customers in need of large scale high performance data solutions, including stock exchanges, commercial banks and other mission-critical data applications. Designed with cyber security, low latency, and high capacity and bandwidth in mind, the SFN8542 (40GbE) and SFN8522 (10GbE) combine a powerful set of features that enable data centers to implement hardware-based micro-segmentation with an enterprise-managed gateway in every server, including:

  • Less than 1 microsecond TCP half round trip latency
  • Greater than 60 Mbps frame processing rates
  • 16 lanes of PCIe Gen 3.1, with full dual 40 Gb/s sustained bidirectional bandwidth
  • Stratum 3E temperature-compensated oscillator
  • Flexible layer 2-4 flow processing and flow steering
  • Full stateless offload support, including double checksum and reassembly for network overlay protocols

Next-Generation Network Protection

Data centers can now better target multiple business-critical issues including mitigating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, data lockdown, data exfiltration, monitoring and capture requirements, precision hardware time stamping and data loss, as well as improving overall system performance. The Flareon Ultra SFN8500 products also incorporate MIFID II readiness, enabling customers to comply with upcoming EU regulatory requirements.

How this Upgrade Will Revolutionize Cloud Performance

Russell Stern, Solarflare’s President and CEO, announced the new generation of adapters with several mission-critical goals in mind. “With our new generation of technology we are revolutionizing the way in which enterprises can scale and secure their data centers. The Flareon Ultra SFN8500 hardware, together with our innovative software, will enable our customers to build out private cloud networks and run the critical applications they were not previously able to. As cyber security becomes the biggest challenge and priority for mission-critical data centers, a number of our customers have already begun using our new products to great impact and we are excited to announce our plans for their general availability.”

The Flareon Ultra SFN8542 and SFN8522, together with the comprehensive suite of software options are now starting to ship.

Solarflare Teams Up with Digital China To Expand World-Class Networking Solutions

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Following a number of exciting partnerships over the past year, Solarflare is bringing its world-class application-intelligent networking solutions to a large new audience. In a new partnership with Digital China—the largest integrated IT service provider in China—Solarflare products will now be widely available for customers in China. Digital China will sell and support Solarflare’s complete line of software and hardware solutions including SolarSecure, OpenOnload, and SolarCapture as well as Flareon adapters.

This partnership marks a huge growth opportunity for Solarflare’s products and services, as Digital China is the leading IT provider in the country. Digital China has played a huge role in driving IT growth in a country that has been going through a huge upgrade recently, with networks moving from 1 GB to 10 GB and beyond. This major upgrade phase allows Solarflare to reach many new customers who are looking to accelerate, monitor and secure their networks with next-generation server solutions.

In addition to this growth opportunity, Solarflare’s robust security offerings will also be supported by Digital China’s security division. “Solarflare provides a new level of enterprise protection solutions for our clients who require mission critical applications,” said Tony Liu, General Manager, Digital China. “With Solarflare’s best-in-class technology software and hardware solutions, we can provide clients with an unprecedented level of high performance computing and security benefits, giving us a tremendous competitive advantage in the marketplace.”

To drive its APAC growth, Solarflare recently appointed 27-year industry veteran Thomas Chin as Vice President of Sales, Asia Pacific. In his new role, Mr. Chin will oversee sales and business development in Asia.

Solarflare’s CEO, Russell Stern, has been excited to announce this partnership. “Digital China’s leadership and expertise in security and capture makes them an ideal partner to help us bring software and hardware solutions to businesses that need to maximize performance, improve efficiency and secure data across the enterprise.”

This is not the first time Solarflare has worked to improve network access, speed and security in China. China’s former internet barriers were commonly known as “the great firewall,” in reference to long site load times and multiple filters that hindered performance. Last year, the San Francisco based security company CloudFlare turned to Solarflare for server solutions, as they needed a 10 GbE capable of keeping pace with their massive growth and rapid-fire networking needs. Last year CloudFlare also joined forces with Baidu, or China’s equivalent of Google, to address the country’s network issues. Since then, they’ve created an internet superhighway that has enabled millions of website page views to experience super-fast load times and optimized performance for the first time. For more on how Solarflare and CloudFlare are working to bring unparalleled performance to China’s internet users, check out the full blog post here.

Solarflare’s recent partnership with Digital China comes at an exciting time, as the IT provider carries out its mission of digitizing China. As the first company to develop China’s “Sm@rt Cities,” Digital China is not only driving China’s IT growth, but also its citizens’ connectivity. Solarflare is excited to be a part of China’s online renaissance.

World’s 2nd Largest Cloud Hosting Provider Partners with Solarflare

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From partnering with CloudFlare to boost the internet in China to joining forces with Stratus and Velocimetrics to improve financial service performance, Solarflare has entered into some exciting partnerships lately. The latest milestone in Solarflare’s quest to bring improved network performance, speed and security to performance cloud, data center and financial institutions comes in the form of a partnership with rising tech star DigitalOcean.

DigitalOcean is the fastest growing cloud infrastructure provider for software developers. The nimble startup is giving giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft a run for their money by providing a simple and scalable SSD cloud server platform. Instead of focusing on matching these huge companies’ quantities of servers, DigitalOcean has shifted its attention to user experience instead. This winning approach has brought the startup over $183 million in funding and a meteoric rise to the world’s second-largest web hosting provider.

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To fuel such explosive growth, DigitalOcean has turned to Solarflare to enhance and accelerate its network. Utilizing Solarflare’s Flareon 7042 Series 10/40GbE PCIe 3.0 server I/O adapters, DigitalOcean can now scale their network capacity much more efficiently and with greater throughput than other solutions on the market.

DigitalOcean provides developers with KVM based cloud infrastructure on demand, allowing them to easily create and build new applications and websites. Utilizing Solarflare’s unique network adapter technology allows developers faster system access while utilizing less network and CPU resources in the process. At the same time, users will be able to scale more efficiently during high periods of demand while offering greater server density per virtual machine (VM).

Ben Uretsky, CEO of DigitalOcean, sees the partnership as a huge win: “Solarflare’s technology roadmap and the company’s dedication to network performance and security made them an ideal strategic partner to meet the demands of our explosive growth.”

DigitalOcean’s 600,000+ developers need the utmost levels of speed, flexibility and scalability to effectively build and customize such a high volume of applications and sites. Solarflare’s Flareon hardware and software ensures that those needs are consistently met by delivering industry-leading message rates with lowest latency and jitter, along with low CPU utilization. In this way, multi-core CPUs can be fully leveraged to efficiently distribute I/O processing workloads, thereby eliminating bottlenecks.

As DigitalOcean continues its rapid growth, their recent partnership with Solarflare takes performance potential to the next level.