Solarflare

The Solarflare company is a pioneer in the field of the highly productive, providing the low level delays of server network solutions 10Gb Ethernet. Approach of the company to architecture of proposed solutions is based on a combination of powerful server adapters and the software for acceleration of applications that allows to guarantee the excellent performance of a wide range of solutions, including high-frequency trading, high-performance computing (HPC), cloud solutions, storages and the virtualized data centers.

Server adapters 10Gb Ethernet Solarflare of the Onload series support software of acceleration of operation of applications of OpenOnload for providing ultralow delays, high message transmission rate and compatibility of applications. Adapters of the Solarflare Onload PTP series, with function of synchronization of the exact time on the basis of the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) IEEE 1588-2008 protocol, allow to increase time synchronization accuracy from milliseconds to shares of microseconds that is extremely important. Server adapters of the Solarflare Performant series combine excellent performance with outstanding efficiency for a wide range of applications.

History

2019: Xilinx purchased Solarflare

At the end of April, 2019 the American producer of integrated microcircuits of a programmed logic (FPGA) Xilinx announced Solarflare purchase to expand the opportunities in the field of network solutions. The companies did not begin to disclose the cost of the transaction which is going to be closed in the fourth quarter 2019.

Solarflare uses FPGA chips which can be reprogrammed on the fly that it is more effective to carry out specific computing objectives and to create the "smart" network interface cards integrating networks, storage systems and computers.

Network interface card of production of Solarflare company

Such network interface cards are called SmartNICS. They reduce delays in data transmission as eliminate need of start of workflows on central processors that promotes performance improvement of servers and improvement of communication. Solarflare also offers special program accelerators which help clients to derive the maximum benefit from SmartNICS.

Xilinx considers that the company, having absorbed Solarflare, will be able to accelerate development of new strategy which is focused on data centers and also to turn from the simple producer of chips into the supplier of platforms, similar Intel and Nvidia.

Though Xilinx is not so known as Intel and Nvidia, the company is a strong player in the semiconductor industry. Some large corporations, including Huawei and Microsoft use its solutions FPGA. For example, there are more than a half of servers based on which cloud services of Azure work, involve Xilinx chips (data by the end of April, 2019).

Sale of Solarflare of Xilinx company was preceded by close cooperation between the companies. So, Xilinx acted as one of the main investors within a round of financing of Solarflare in 2018, and in the 2019th the companies provided the first joint product — the SmartNIC network interface card on the basis of FPGA, capable to process 100 million data packets per second.^[1]

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