Windows Scalable Networking Initiative

Updated: April 30, 2004

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This paper provides information about the Windows Scalable Networking initiative for the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. It provides an overview of the initiative for analysts and IT professionals to better understand how the technologies can be deployed and what types of applications will benefit. Specific technologies covered include Receive-Side Scaling, TCP Chimney, RDMA Chimney, and IPSec Chimney.

Networking speeds have dramatically increased in recent years, exposing several new architectural bottlenecks within the Microsoft Windows network protocol stack. Microsoft recognized this some time ago and has helped lead the industry in eliminating the bottlenecks and enabling cost-effective, robust, manageable, and scalable improvements in performance and functionality for multi-gigabit networking. The result has been Microsoft's initiative called Scalable Networking, which will introduce a family of architectural innovations in future releases of the Windows family of operating systems.

This paper provides a broad overview of the two approaches to improving the scalability of the network protocol stack. The first approach is referred to as "stateless offload" - where the offload interface does not require state to be stored in the offload engine that scales as the number of connections that are offloaded. The second approach is a "stateful offload" - where the amount of state that is potentially offloaded can scale proportionately to the number of connections that are offloaded. Note that the "stateful offload" approach enables the independent hardware vendor (IHV) to trade off cost, hardware features, and software implementation to create the optimal product for their market(s).

This information applies for Windows Vista.

Included in this white paper:

• Introduction

• Scalable Networking Initiative Goals

• Overview of Receive-Side Scaling

• Overview of the Chimney Architecture

• Overview of the TCP Chimney

• Future Chimney Offloads

• Delivering Quality Offload Technology

• References