T6 SmartNIC Adapters Enhance OpenShift Environments with Superior Networking Performance, Efficiency, and AI Workload Acceleration
SUNNYVALE, Calif., March 21, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Chelsio Communications, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance (1/10/25/40/50/100/200/400Gb) Ethernet Unified Wire Adapters and ASICs for storage networking, virtualized enterprise datacenters, cloud service installations, and embedded and cluster computing environments, today announced the results of its independent testing of T6 SmartNICs with Red Hat OpenShift.
The test results highlight the significant performance advantages of Chelsio T6 adapters in OpenShift environments, delivering line-rate throughput of 98 Gbps with only 46% CPU usage. These results demonstrate the ability of T6 SmartNICs to enhance OpenShift deployments by providing optimized high-performance networking solutions for containerized and AI-driven workloads.
Chelsio T6 Testing with OpenShift
Chelsio independently tested T6 SmartNICs with Red Hat OpenShift to evaluate networking performance in containerized environments. The tests validated T6’s ability to deliver high-throughput, low-latency networking while efficiently utilizing CPU resources. The results confirm that OpenShift users can benefit from:
- Optimized SR-IOV performance for high-density container deployments
- Industry-leading throughput of 98 Gbps with minimal CPU overhead, freeing resources for AI inferencing and data processing.
- Scalability to support AI, machine learning, and data-intensive workloads in OpenShift clusters
- Seamless integration with OpenShift networking architectures to enhance real-time AI and analytics applications
“With the publication of our OpenShift test results, we are demonstrating our commitment to delivering industry-leading networking solutions for OpenShift and AI-driven environments,” said Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO of Chelsio Communications. “These findings highlight how T6 SmartNICs enable enterprises to maximize performance, optimize resource efficiency, and accelerate AI workloads in their OpenShift deployments.”
Accelerating OpenShift and AI Adoption with T6
By making these results available to the OpenShift and Kubernetes communities, Chelsio is providing OpenShift users with a validated, high-performance networking solution that they can confidently deploy today. The published test results demonstrate how T6 SmartNICs enhance OpenShift environments by delivering superior throughput, lower CPU utilization, and improved scalability—critical for AI, deep learning, and data analytics workloads. These benefits enable OpenShift users to accelerate AI inference, optimize model training, and deploy data-driven applications more efficiently.
By sharing these results with the OpenShift and AI communities, Chelsio aims to increase awareness and adoption of T6 SmartNICs while providing OpenShift users with a tested, high-performance networking option for AI and data-centric deployments.
Additionally, by demonstrating the performance and scalability benefits of T6 in OpenShift environments, this initiative lays the groundwork for future collaboration with Red Hat on formal OpenShift certification, helping to ensure long-term support and seamless integration within OpenShift deployments.
Industry Commentary
“Red Hat OpenShift has become a leading platform for deploying modern applications, including AI and other data-intensive workloads,” said Gary Chen, Research Director, Software Defined Compute at IDC. “As enterprises scale their OpenShift deployments, high-performance, low-latency networking solutions become increasingly critical to accelerate AI-driven application performance in containerized infrastructures.”
Additional Resources
Advanced High-Performance Networking Solutions for Red Hat® OpenShift® (Chelsio Technical Report)
High-Performance Networking for Kubernetes (Chelsio Technical Report)
About Chelsio Communications
Chelsio is a recognized leader in high-performance (1/10/25/40/50/100/200/400Gb) Ethernet adapters for networking and storage within virtualized enterprise data centers, public and private hyperscale clouds, and embedded and cluster computing environments. With a clear emphasis on performance and delivering the only robust offload solution, as opposed to simple speeds and feeds, Chelsio has set itself apart from the competition. The Chelsio Unified Wire and DPU solutions fully offload all protocol traffic, providing no-compromise performance with high packet processing capacity, sub-microsecond hardware latency, and high bandwidth. Visit the company at www.chelsio.com and follow the company on X and Facebook.
Red Hat and OpenShift are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries.
SOURCE Chelsio Communications, Inc.
