Neterion (formerly S2io Technologies) was founded in 2001 to develop “next generation 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking products for high performance server and networked storage environments.” In January 2002, S2io secured CDN $14 million in Series A funding led by VenGrowth with The Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) as co-investor. In January 2003, S2io secured US $18 million in Series B funding, which was an up round. The Series B round was priced and led by Menlo Ventures with participation from existing investors. S2io has secured approximately US $27 million to date. The company is fully funded and expects to hit breakeven in 2H’04. S2io has 45 employees and locations in Ottawa, Canada and Cupertino, California.
In the server market, 1Gb Ethernet has become a performance bottleneck for moving data. A major roadblock to achieving optimal performance for 10 Gigabit Ethernet is the I/O bottleneck. Server and storage CPUs are consumed with processing TCP/IP traffic, which limits their application processing capabilities causing delays to the end user. Increasingly, server and storage vendors are utilizing best in class 3rd party I/O solutions with their system platforms. However, many of the leading 3rd party I/O vendors have scaled back or eliminated investments in new technologies, according to S2io.
S2io is developing a family of CPU assist and offload products that server and storage OEMs can easily integrate into their own products. S2io will serve three key target markets in the server and storage environments: large corporate data centers, Internet hosting data centers, and high performance cluster computing centers.
S2io will release its first CPU assist product, a 10GigE I/O board, in the near future. It will reduce DMA thrashing, reduce CPU overhead by up to 40%, decrease latency by 50% and will require no OS modifications. TCP processing overhead is reduced by 40% using stateless offload (TCP checksum, UDP checksum, Large Send Offload, Jumbo frames, and Assist for short-lived TCP connections). Server vendors can replace 6-8 1GbE cards/cables with one 10 GbE adapter vastly simplifying manageability. S2io’s solution extends ECC into the entire system through the 10 GbE adapter.
This first product represents the initial phase of a product roadmap that is focused on “dramatically improving performance, reliability and availability of networked server and storage environments in the data center.” According to S2io, stateless offload is the only sensible approach today, since today’s TCP/IP is not designed to be “split” cleanly. The follow-on product will take advantage of the Microsoft Windows TCP/IP Chimney Offload architecture, which provides a standard API for segmenting TCP/IP processing between hardware TOE engines and the operating system networking stack. The company is actively developing follow-on features that will add TCP/IP, RDMA (see below) and iSCSI offload capabilities, resulting in an order of magnitude reduction in latencies and up to 90% lower CPU I/O utilization, while featuring standardized interfaces for ease of integration.
S2io is a board vendor, not a chip vendor, and has extensive value-added software expertise. However, obviously at 10 gigabit speeds custom silicon is a key part of S2io’s value proposition. S2io has licensed Tensilica’s Xtensa V core for its follow-on family of 10 Gbps Ethernet storage-connectivity products. “By taking advantage of Tensilica’s automated approach to customizing the processor, S2io can get the speed needed with lower power and smaller die size.” S2io’s next generation TOE board will be introduced in late 2004.
S2io is a member of the Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) Consortium (www.rdmaconsortium.org). Founded by Adaptec, Broadcom, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Network Appliance, the RDMA Consortium is developing standard’s based methods of increasing the efficiency of data communications over TCP/IP networks. RDMA technology enables removal of data copy operations and reduces latency by allowing one computer to directly place information in another computer’s memory.
Intel has introduced a 10 GigE board, however, S2io claims that it has far fewer features than its solution. Other potential competitors include Alacritech, iReady, and other traditional I/O board vendors. S2io’s first product is currently being evaluated by the leading server and storage OEMs and will be in general release in late Q4.
Dave Zabrowski, president and CEO (most recently VP and GM of HP’s North American Business PC organization)
Mike McPherson, VP of Sales & Business Development (Most recently a Dir. of Bus. Development at Nortel-HPOCS. He was the Director of OEM Sales Gigabit Ethernet startup Alteon.)
Kimball Brown, VP of Marketing (previously VP of Business Development for Broadcom subsidiary ServerWorks and VP and Chief Analyst for the Servers Worldwide program at Gartner/Dataquest)
Leonid Grossman, VP of Software Engineering (most recently a software development manager with Alteon and Nortel-HPOCS)
Dennis Shwed, VP of Hardware Engineering (most recently Senior Manager, ASIC Development at Nortel)
Lee Shepherd, CTO (most recently the system architect of the Server and Storage I/O Solutions group at Nortel-HPOCS)
Terri Scheufele, Director of Operations (most recently Dir. of Operations for HP’s PC Organization)
Canada R&D:
505 March Road, Suite 120
Kanata, Ontario K2K 2M5 Canada
Tel: 613/271-9859, Fax: 613/271-0972
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