STAC Report: Teak Technologies AZ-10GE with RMDS

Teak algorithms boost effective bandwidth per connection by 26%. Thursday, 13 March 2008 - STAC has released its first test results involving 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE) technology. Teak Technologies provides 10GigE switches and NICs under the product name “AZ-10GE”. One of the distinguishing features that Teak claims is “Acceleration Zone Ethernet,” a hardware-based collection of algorithms that detect, diagnose, and rectify networking artifacts that hinder application performance and prevent a firm from achieving the full potential of 10GigE. STAC tested the Teak equipment using the Reuters Market Data System. First, we designed a harness that distributed massive amounts of traffic down a single link (by simulating numerous connections from applications on a trading floor to RMDS servers in a data center) in order to find the maximum throughput of the Teak network with and without AZ-10GE algorithms enabled. Second, we performed the standard RMDS latency tests using the Teak system with AZ-10GE algorithms disabled. In addition to the Teak networking products, the stack under test consisted of an IBM BladeCenter platform using Intel Xeon quad-core 2.66 GHz blades running Red Hat Enterprise Linux ver 5.1. There was no use of TOE, RDMA, iWarp or other client-side acceleration. We found:

• Peak throughput of 9.6 gigabits/second using Teak AZ-10GE algorithms, compared to 7.6 gigabits/second without AZ-10GE (in an RMDS configuration optimized for throughput).
• 1 millisecond or less of mean infrastructure latency at message rates up to 450,000 updates per second (in an RMDS configuration optimized for latency).
• At every level of throughput, mean latencies of this 10GigE-based RMDS stack were significantly better than those of any 1 Gigabit Ethernet-based RMDS stacks that STAC has tested.

Report download here available to registered users at no cost.