LeWiz Releases Three Dual-Port GigE NIC Cards

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LeWiz Communications releases 3 dual-port GigE NIC cards for the copper and fiber-optic Ethernet with x1 and x4 PCI-Express (PCI-E) host interface. This new family of dual-port products allows the users to take advantage of the x1 PCI-Express slots in their workstations and desktops as well as the larger x4, x8, and x16 PCI-Express slots in their servers, storage, and networking systems. LeWiz's Talon1214 network interface card (NIC) is the first board in the market to offer 2 ports of Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) performance on a single lane of PCI-E slot. These x1 PCI-E slots are typically available in high performance workstations such as Sun's Ultra20 and other desktop clients.

But until now, no other card in the market can offer such performance and integration for the slot. The dual-port feature allows the users to expand their desktop and workstations easily. One port of the card can be used to connect to the main LAN network while the 2nd port can be used to connect to other local Ethernet peripherals such as NAS/iSCSI storage box or high resolution cameras directly at their desk. The user can also use the dual port to allow faster connection to the network by port aggregation or connecting to multiple subnets directly. The card has diskless remote boot capability which enables quicker system setup and saves the cost of the boot disk.

LeWiz Talon1244 NICs consist of 2 cards - 1 designed for the copper Ethernet, another is for the fiber optic network. The Talon1244 products are dual-port GigE, low profile PCI-Express NIC designed for a wide range of server, storage, and security systems. The board is available with copper or fiber optic (SX/LX/EX) cabling. It's designed to work in the low cost, short distance LAN applications as well as the long distance WAN/MAN applications up to 70 Kilometers. The board is low cost and suitable for small, medium, or large size businesses. It can be used for deployment on campus, within the data center or for inter-data center applications. LeWiz's Talon1244 card is designed to maximize the performance of each port to full wire rate in both directions even with both ports being used simultaneously.

Both the Talon1214 and 1244 products have a dedicated MAC on each port with its own transmit/receive engines, DMA and buffers. Each of the ports has advance offload functions such as TCP/UDP transmit segmentation, checksum processing and iSCSI/NFS assist benefiting applications such as video, iSCSI, NAS storage, VoIP, and others. The ports have advanced interrupt handling scheme maximizing the efficiency of multi-processor or multi-threaded systems. Teaming or aggregating the ports together into a single pipe allows much higher bandwidth.

The physical size of these new boards is tiny - about the physical size of a typical credit card but packing 2 GigE ports. Its small size is ideal for small 1U, 2U form factor computing systems. A full range of loadable device drivers are also available for many different operating systems from Windows, to Linux, to Solaris and OpenBSD. It simply works every where and is easy to deploy. Remote diskless booting firmware is also available.

The Talon1214 and 1244 cards are new additions to the already successful, widely deployed Talon NICs from LeWiz which support multiple ports of GigE and 10GigE on a single card for the PCI-express bus. Customers using the Talon1214 or 1244 card can upgrade to higher port count or higher speed easily.

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