Chelsio Communications today announced its second generation family of 10GbE and iSCSI adapters, with industry-leading performance and aggressive volume OEM pricing as low as $1,295 that is expected to speed the adoption rate for 10Gb Ethernet in enterprise applications. Chelsio's T210 Protocol Engine and N210 Server Adapter are software-compatible upgrades from the first generation T110 and N110 cards, respectively, which have been shipping since early 2004. Additionally, Chelsio is debuting its T204 Protocol Engine, a 4-port Gigabit Ethernet Protocol Engine targeted for storage applications that may not yet require 10Gb performance. The OEM pricing for the new adapters is the most aggressive in the industry. The N210 server adapter is available in high volume for $1,295. The T210 Protocol Engine, the only 10GbE adapter shipping today with TCP/IP offload (TOE) capability, is volume priced at $1995. The T204 is volume priced at $795. With its continuous silicon integration, Chelsio expects to halve these prices every twelve months. Chelsio's 10Gb Ethernet adapters with protocol acceleration are already deployed in dozens of high-performance computing environments today and are being designed in at several leading OEMs. Chelsio's 10Gb Ethernet adapters have been proven as robust and stable with the industry's highest performance, as demonstrated by recently establishing the Internet2 Land Speed Record. Chelsio's 10GbE TOE and iSCSI accelerator were first to market in 2004 and now with its 2nd generation silicon is even easier to deploy and supports the mature price structure announced today. Zeus Kerravala, vice president of research at The Yankee Group, said "The market for 10Gb Ethernet appears to be heating up, and the availability of 10-GbE adapters with protocol offload enables the unification of local area networks, storage and high performance clusters into a single unified Ethernet network. Protocol offload greatly improves server CPU cycles, and that is the performance bottleneck in high speed networking today." At 10Gbps rates, it's widely accepted that CPU throughput limits performance. Chelsio's TOE enables higher CPU throughput, extending the application performance of servers and resulting in lower total cost of ownership for data centers. Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio, said "Our OEM partners are very interested in the convergence of LANs, SANs and clustering fabrics onto a unified 10Gb Ethernet network. Fiber Channel has now lost its performance advantage over Ethernet due to our protocol offload and history shows us that Ethernet will be the ultimate winner over proprietary and niche networking technologies. Our Terminator architecture has had extensive stress testing with our OEM partners. It is very robust and stable, and it is ready for volume deployments," Naghshineh added. "Our offload engine adapter is especially easy to use, requiring no application modification." John Joseph, vice president of marketing, EqualLogic, said "We are currently testing the Chelsio protocol offload engine and have found it very easy to use for TOE/iSCSI acceleration. We are committed to evaluating all the latest technologies to help our PS Series SAN customers leverage the power of 10GbE for high-performance storage consolidation and data protection services."