NetEffect Nails New Funding

NetEffect, a startup specializing in 10-Gbit/s Ethernet adapters based on the iWarp protocol, has scored $25 million in Series B funding. (See NetEffect Wins New Funding.) The move, bringing NetEffect's total funding to about $47 million, highlights growing interest in the iWarp technique -- interest that isn't, however, backed by implementation.

iWarp (short for Internet wide area RDMA protocol) is a set of protocols designed to run RDMA (remote direct memory access) over IP. By doing this, a computer or storage device can bypass the operating system when data is being transmitted. As a result, iWarp reduces the processing burden encountered when running Ethernet as a high-speed interconnect.

iWarp proponents say their technique increases Ethernet's performance in high-performance computing (HPC) environments, while staying cheaper than Fibre Channel and InfiniBand, since it is (in theory, at least) fully compatible with Ethernet and doesn't require specialized hardware, software, and training.

The reality of iWarp has yet to match the hype. NetEffect is so far the only vendor to offer a prototype product on which a user is available to comment -- albeit not through NetEffect's referral. (More on than in a moment.) NetEffect says its product will be generally available in the third quarter of this year.

Chelsio, which recently received $12 million in funding, and Neterion, which has partnered with IBM, claim to be in preproduction as well, and Chelsio's CEO Kianoosh Naghshineh tentatively puts a timeframe of the first quarter 2007 for official release of his company's product. Neither vendor can provide users for comment. Broadcom, which purchased iWarp vendor Siliquent a year ago, is said to be readying a product for release by the end of 2006, but a vendor spokesman will not comment on the rumor. (See Broadcom Takes 10-Gig Shortcut, LSI Backs Chelsio, and IBM Selects Neterion.)iWarp's status as a standard is also still unproven. An UNH-IOL iWarp Testing Consortium started at the University of New Hampshire appears to have gone nowhere. A group of vendors, including Chelsio and NetEffect (Neterion is finalizing the paperwork to join), say they have formed a common set of application programming interfaces under the auspices of the OpenFabrics Alliance, but at least one analyst says there are other, competing techniques that must be sifted through as well.

"OpenFabrics has had some amount of convergence around APIs, but ... [iWarp] has a long way to go. The UNH work needs to get restarted. Other vendors [than NetEffect] need to produce solutions, so that there can be interoperability tests," says Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at the Linley Group consultancy. "Otherwise, who's to say iWarp isn't just another proprietary implementation?"

Indeed, in Wheeler's estimation, the primary competition for NetEffect's prototype isn't coming from the likes of Chelsio, but from Myrinet, which just announced it can run its protocol for HPC directly over Ethernet, and Mellanox, the key supplier in the InfiniBand market, is said to be pondering an IPO. (See Ethernet Enlarges Supercomputing and Will Mellanox Make IPO Move?.)

Though NetEffect spokespeople would not offer one of the startup's claimed dozen or so beta customers to comment at press time, Byte and Switch found independently that at least one source is impressed with the firm's wares. A researcher at the Ohio Supercomputer Center says his group has been testing a couple of "loaner" adapters from NetEffect. Originally, his group was involved with testing wares from Ammasso, which went out of business in 2005. (See Ohio Opts for iWarp.)

"We are seeing some exciting performance results already... The NetEffect cards pretty much saturate the PCI-X bus, so throughput is good," writes researcher Dennis Dalesandro in an email today. He says he's found the NetEffect cards to show a bit higher latency than InfiniBand, but he believes that may be helped when NetEffect moves its wares to the PCI Express bus, billed as the follow-on to PCI-X. What's more, he says he's tested a switch from Fulcrum Micro with NetEffect's cards and found the switch latency to be comparable to InfiniBand's. (See NetEffect, Fulcrum Team.)Observations like these should help to make NetEffect's latest round a useful one -- and promote growth of iWarp, albeit slow growth that's unlikely to produce much real substance until the end of 2007, at the earliest.

Investors in NetEffect's latest round include all of the startup's initial investors --AustinVentures, Duchossois Technology Partners, Granite Ventures, Infinity Capital, JatoTech Ventures, TI Ventures, and TL Ventures.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch