TINA Speeds Up Storage.

Wind River Systems, a provider of software and services for connected smart devices, announced beta availability of Tornado for Intelligent Network Acceleration (TINA), an integrated software platform for the LAN and storage networking markets. Using TINA, OEMs can deliver performance improvements in their server and storage devices. By offloading network traffic to an intelligent network interface card (iNIC), TINA increases throughput rates in servers, and brings high performance to storage area networks (SANs) migrating from Fibre Channel to IP and Ethernet environments.

Networking speeds have been increasing by a factor of ten every two years, outpacing improvements in microprocessor performance. Becoming common throughout the Internet infrastructure, Gigabit Ethernet has greatly impacted server and storage devices. To the dismay of IT professionals charged with maintaining productive systems, application performance steadily erodes as they struggle to keep up with network demand. TINA offers a solution to this dilemma by introducing a specialized architecture that offloads network processing to an intelligent network interface.

The most common approach for dealing with the challenge of server and storage products grinding to a halt at Gigabit speeds is to purchase additional, more powerful servers, an extremely expensive solution. In addition, IT departments will often buy multiple NICs per server, which quickly erodes application performance as the host CPU spends all of its cycles processing network requests.

"By offloading the TCP/IP stack with the TINA solution onto an intelligent NIC, servers are able to meet networking performance demands while sparing precious CPU cycles for applications, all in a very cost efficient manner," said Dave Fraser, vice president and general manager of Wind River's Networks business unit, in a recent press release.

TINA is also a possible solution for the SAN market where high performance networking at Gigabit speeds is a necessity. In particular, TINA enables IP and Ethernet technology to replace the current Fibre Channel transport in the data center. Additionally, TINA is an ideal platform for emerging IP-based storage technologies such as iSCSI.