Sales

SalesIn August 2013, Scott joined forces with Solarflare Communications to promote 10GbE using their advanced ASIC architecture to his customers. Unlike Myricom’s six-year-old technology, Solarflare had just released their latest silicon on their SFN7xxx series cards. Several prior families of this silicon existed, so this ASIC was highly evolved in both features and performance. Since then, Solarflare has turned their NIC ASIC silicon several times and released the following software-defined NIC applications/firmware:

  • ULL – Ultra-low latency firmware, enabling <1us 1/2 round trip TCP performance.
  • PTP – Precision Time Protocol, timestamping with nanosecond resolution.
  • ServerLock – Hardware firewalling within the NIC (never formally released as a product).
  • PackedStream – multiple Ethernet frames in a single PCIe transfer for capture.
  • TXStriping – multiple Ethernet transmit frames in a single PCIe transfer.

In 2017, Solarflare delivered DPDK support, a NIC-agnostic TCP transport for NVMe over fabrics, and a line of capture appliances.

From August 2005 through August 2013, Scott worked for Myricom, helping them better service IBM, HP, and direct accounts in the eastern US. Myricom began shipping high-performance 10Gb Ethernet adapters in February 2006.

Myricom delivered wire-rate 10Gb Ethernet cards capable of both the theoretical maximum bandwidth (9.981Gbps) and packet rate (14.88Mpps) and exceedingly low latency (~2us). Unfortunately, today, Myricom’s 8A, 8B, and 8C line of cards are based on a chip fabricated in 2007. Only the newer FPGA-based 8D series card, which came out in 2014, is reasonably current.