Finalizes Version 1.0 of iSER Protocol and Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) Specifications

October 31, 2003 – The RDMA Consortium today announced completion of all planned specifications relating to the RDMA protocol suite. The RDMA protocol suite provides more efficient and scalable computing while leveraging existing, industry-standard Ethernet infrastructures. Since the RDMA protocol can place data directly into its final memory destination, system processors and memory are freed up for user applications. With the improved efficiency and performance of RDMA-enabled NICs (RNICs), applications are better able to scale by sharing tasks across the network as opposed to centralizing work in larger, more expensive systems. More efficient networking also offers the opportunity to converge functions in the data center over fewer types of interconnects.

Finalizing versions 1.0 of the iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER) Protocol and Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) specifications moves the focus of RDMA efforts to first-generation industry implementations of RDMA over TCP solutions. The iSER specification defines extensions to the data transfer model of iSCSI, a storage networking standard for TCP/IP, to allow iSCSI devices to take advantage of the performance benefits of RDMA, while utilizing the existing iSCSI infrastructure. These extensions use the Datamover Architecture for iSCSI (DA) specification for movement of data between iSCSI end nodes.

SDP allows existing internet applications to take advantage of the performance benefits of RDMA without application modification. The SDP specification describes how to map existing internet applications, which typically use TCP sockets, onto a RDMA network. This allows RDMA hardware to be used by existing internet applications and enables protocol offload, kernel bypass, and zero copy capabilities. Additional information about the iSER, DA and SDP specifications, and the overall benefits of RDMA, is available at www.rdmaconsortium.org.

The completed iSER and SDP specifications accompany the RDMA wire-protocol suite, which was completed in October 2002 and the Verbs specification which was completed in April 2003. The delivery of iSER, SDP, the RDMA wire-protocol suite and the Verbs Specifications complete the family of protocols necessary to enable deployment of RDMA based networking, Inter-Process Communication (IPC), and storage infrastructures. The specifications are suitable for first-generation industry implementations of RDMA over TCP solutions and complete the information required for RDMA infrastructure development.

The RDMA Consortium member companies and individuals are active participants in the IETF process and will continue working within the IETF on RDMA protocol specifications. The consortium members will continue to address Errata for the RDMA Consortium specifications.

Founded by Adaptec, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADPT), Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM), Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), HP (NYSE: HPQ), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Intel Corporation (Nasdaq: INTC), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Network Appliance, Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP), the RDMA Consortium is an independent consortium formed to develop the architectural specifications necessary to implement products that provide RDMA over TCP/IP networks, including Ethernet-based networks. These specifications will help organizations meet increasing demands for networking bandwidth and speed that are currently growing faster than the processing power and memory bandwidth of the compute nodes that process networking traffic.

About the RDMA Consortium

The RDMA Consortium is an open industry forum chartered to develop architectural specifications necessary to implement products that provide RDMA technology over TCP/IP. Additional information about the RDMA Consortium, membership information, contacts for founding companies and other materials can be found at http://www.rdmaconsortium.org.

###

Any product or service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.