Ethernet start-up wants to be on every server
By China Martens, IDG News Service, 06/20/05
Start-up
Level 5 Networks believes it can solve the growing problem of
inefficient Ethernet connectivity with its EtherFabric network card and
software. Emerging from stealth mode Monday, executives at the
50-person company also talked up their ultimate ambition for
EtherFabric to ship with every server sold worldwide, directly
positioning their offering against current iWarp and InfiniBand
interconnect technologies.
EtherFabric
works with existing standards to improve network performance unlike
iWarp and InfiniBand, which are incompatible with current network
infrastructure and so can require users to replace hardware and
software, according to Level 5 CEO Dan Karr. The EtherFabric network
card and software are less of a drain on host server CPUs and allow
servers to communicate with each other faster and at higher speeds. The
company also claims that using EtherFabric will enable users to reduce
the number of servers they deploy by a maximum of 50%.
"The
reactions from people we've shown EtherFabric to is surprise," Karr
said. "They're skeptical. But when they see what we can do, it's an
easy sell. Over time, we hope to have our chips on the motherboard of
every server manufactured." He expects EtherFabric to be used in
supercomputers and enterprise data centers as well as servers.
Phil
Williams, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
advanced research fellow at the School of Pharmacy at the University of
Nottingham in the U.K., has been beta testing EtherFabric. The EPSRC is
the U.K. government's funding agency for research and training in
engineering and the physical sciences.
Part
of Williams' research involves studying proteins and how they fold
using molecular dynamics software running across Beowulf-style clusters
of computer nodes. He has been testing EtherFabric on a cluster of
eight dual-processor Sun servers running Novell's Suse Enterprise Linux
and has experienced a performance increase of around eight times on
some of his code. Williams has been comparing EtherFabric's performance
to that of Myrinet from Myricom of Arcadia, Calif., and rated
EtherFabric very favorable in ease of use, price and low network
latency.
"Level
5 has been very supportive [of us] and EtherFabric's architecture and
system has been flawless," he said. "I'm not a hardware expert, but I
think this sort of technology should be adopted by manufacturers"
replacing GigaEthernet with EtherFabric.
The
university has recently installed a 512-node cluster of Sun Fire V20z
servers known as Jupiter that Williams claims is the fastest machine in
the U.K. and the third fastest in Europe. "We will be seriously looking
at upgrading the machine [Jupiter] with EtherFabric in the future," he
said. "We would expect to see an almost 10% improvement in performance
by adopting EtherFabric." Jupiter is rated for 3.1 teraflops of
performance, so if the university adopted and achieved the expected
gains from EtherFabric, peak performance could rise to between 3.4
teraflops or 3.5 teraflops, Williams added.
"Level
5 has established an aggressive price/performance and has a very, very
good technical presentation. They have an excellent product at 1
gigabit," said Frank Dzubeck, president of Washington D.C., analyst
firm Communications Network Architects. However, he points out that
other players are already offering 10-gigabit Ethernet and also that
"it's open warfare" in today's market with a whole variety of protocols
and products in play. While networking giant Cisco has declared its
intention to put the intelligence for networks into its switches, major
server companies - notably HP, IBM and Sun - have yet to reveal their
intentions. One or more of them could potentially partner with Level 5,
but they might equally well have their own product plans or choose to
hook up with another partner, Dzubeck said.
Dana
Krelle, vice president, marketing at Level 5, sees the interconnect
market as pretty flexible and predicts large IT vendors could move over
to EtherFabric from existing technologies without much trouble. "In
1999 and 2000, everyone was backing InfiniBand," he said. "Then they
decided it was hard to get customers to adopt it, so maybe they'd do it
over Ethernet [with iWarp.] It shows they're not permanently wedded to
any particular thing. "
EtherFabric
is generally available Monday and Level 5's Karr said that his company
can ship product anywhere in the world, with relationships already in
place with shipping companies and a subcontractor in the California Bay
Area that is producing the network cards. The company expects to
rapidly build sales channels throughout Asia and Europe and the first
vertical it will target is the life sciences market, he added.
The
EtherFabric software shipping Monday runs on the Linux kernel 2.4 and
2.6, with support for Windows and Unix coming in the first half of next
year. High volume pricing is US$295 for a two-port, 1G byte-per-port
EtherFabric network interface card and software, while low volume
quantities start from $495.
EtherFabric
was developed by "four chaps in a garden shed" in Cambridge, England,
according to Karr. After having built the fastest LAN using proprietary
technology in 2000 while at AT&T Laboratories, the four found
themselves unemployed when the research facility shut down in 2002.
They came up with the idea of making their work standards-based,
running over Ethernet. They worked in the garden shed until receiving
Series A funding to the tune of $9 million in December 2003 from Accel
Partners.
Level
5 will announce Monday it has raised $30 million in Series B funding
Monday from Accel and investors new to the company - Amadeus Capital
Partners, IDG Ventures and Oak Investment Partners. IDG Ventures is the
venture capital arm of International Data Group, which also owns IDG
News Service.
"We have big investors in case we need more money," Karr said, though he added that Level 5 still has "by far most of the
$39 million in the bank."
Level
5 has headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., where staff work on silicon
design, while software development is handled in the company's
Cambridge office. The 50 staff is split equally between the two
locations, Karr said, and he expects the workforce to grow to 70
employees by year-end.
The
name Level 5 refers to the network protocol stack where Level 5
delivers data from the network to the application, according to Karr.
The company isn't concerned about any potential confusion with Internet
Protocol telecom Level 3 Communications Inc. On the contrary, he
quipped, "It's working in our favor. People say, 'Yes, we've heard of
you. You're a big company.'"
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
