Microsoft Ships TCP Chimney Technology as 'Scalable Networking Pack'

Published: May 24, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Much of the talk at WinHEC 2006 this week has been focused on upcoming products like Windows Server "Longhorn," Windows Vista, and the new hypervisor and virtualization technologies "Viridian" and "Carmine." But Microsoft also saved time to make a Windows Server 2003 related announcement, too, namely the availability of the new Windows Server 2003 Scalable Networking Pack.

The Windows Server 2003 Scalable Networking pack enables the operating system to handle large bandwidth networking connections without taking processing power away from applications, says Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Server and Tools. The technology is based on Microsoft's TCP Chimney Offload architecture.

"As network speeds increase to multi-gigabit and beyond, more CPU cycles will be needed to drive network devices at the speeds that are available to them," Muglia says in a PressPass Q&A. "This has the potential to limit server scalability, such as the number of users that each server can support. The innovations and architectural enhancements in our new Scalable Networking Pack allow customers to, in effect, turbo charge their Windows Server systems and achieve higher server performance."

This "turbo charging" is accomplished by offloading potentially CPU-intensive packet processing to specialized network adapters, which then frees up processors to perform more application-related tasks, Muglia says.

Microsoft is working with partners to build these specialized adapters, and several companies have them ready now. One of those companies is Alacritech, the San Jose, California, company that recently agreed to a settlement with Microsoft regarding the TCP Chimney technology. Alacritech supports Microsoft's Scalable Networking Pack in its SEN2000 line of NICs and its SES2000 line of iSCSI controllers.

Another company supporting Microsoft's Scalable Networking Pack is Broadcom Technology. The Irvine, California, manufacturer says its entire line of NetXtreme II NICs support TCP Chimney Offload and Receive-side Scaling functionality. Chelsio Communications and NetXen also announced support in their line of networking adapters.