ThinkSystem Broadcom 57508 100GbE QSFP56 Ethernet Adapters

The ThinkSystem Broadcom 57508 100GbE QSFP56 Ethernet adapters are a high-performance low-power 100 Gb Ethernet adapter with a PCIe 4.0 host interface that offers TruFlow intelligent flow processing and supports advanced networking technologies such as VXLAN, NVGRE, Geneve, RoCE, SDN and NFV, to facilitate the management of data networks and to enable service provider solutions. The adapters are available in PCIe low-profile or OCP 3.0 form factors.

The following figure shows the PCIe Low Profile adapter.

Figure 1. ThinkSystem Broadcom 57508 100GbE QSFP56 2-port PCIe 4 Ethernet Adapter

These adapters are based on the Broadcom BCM57508 scalable Ethernet controller architecture which is designed to build highly-scalable, feature-rich networking solutions. The adapters are an ideal choice for enterprise and cloud-scale networking and storage applications, including high-performance computing, telco, machine learning, storage disaggregation, and data analytics.

The ordering information is listed in the following table.

The adapters, when shipped as a stand-alone option part number, include the following items:

• One Broadcom adapter
• PCIe adapter: An attached full-height (3U) bracket, and a low-profile (2U) bracket that can be substituted if needed
• Documentation flyer  

The following figure shows the OCP adapter:

Figure 2. ThinkSystem Broadcom 57508 100GbE QSFP56 2-Port OCP Ethernet Adapter

The adapters have two empty QSFP56 cages for connectivity.

The following table lists the supported transceivers.

The following table lists the supported fiber optic cables and Active Optical Cables.

Driven by the growing need for higher server bandwidth and storage capacity to support new and emerging applications (Machine Learning, HPC, Multi-node containers, NVMe, Web 2.0, NVMe storage disaggregation, HCI), enterprises, telcos and cloud providers are modernizing their data centers by adopting latest networking technologies, such as server virtualization and NVMe-oF™. The resulting expansion in data volumes increases server-to-server traffic and CPU loads for networking tasks.

With its market-leading hardware acceleration technologies, the ThinkSystem Broadcom 57508 100GbE adapters address these performance and service demands of mega-scale data center networks with high throughput and advanced flow processing. Features such as TruFlow™ increase VM density up to 50%, freeing more CPU cycles for additional virtual machines. On-chip tunneling protocol processing for Geneve, VXLAN, and NVGRE provides up to a 5X throughput increase while lowering CPU utilization up to 90 percent compared to software-only solutions.

The adapters have the following features:

• 2x 100GbE network connectivity for high availability features eliminating throughput bottlenecks for data-intensive applications
• Industry’s best performing and longest-reach 50G PAM-4 / 25G NRZ SerDes dramatically lowering TCO by reducing cable costs by 50% and doubling port density
• PCIe 4.0 x16 support maximizing the full potential of servers compliant with the PCI Express 4.0 specification, providing seamless interoperability and doubling server throughput while saving PCIe lanes
• Third generation Broadcom TruFlow™ engine for intelligent flow processing to increase server VM density and accelerate vSwitch processing of traffic flows with data path Acceleration. TruFlow enables efficient network flow processing, increases Virtual Machine density by offloading the server CPU to improve application performance.
• RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet), allows Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) traffic to be communicated over Converged Ethernet using DCB. GPU Compute over RoCE enables scalable GPU clusters up to hundreds of nodes using Ethernet for HPC, AI, and ML applications.
• Broadcom’s Smart Congestion Control provides consistent and predictable performance for real world workloads plus scaling for heavily loaded network traffic making it ideal for clients looking for deterministic low latency.
• Broadcom adapters are the industry’s most secure PCIe Ethernet controller solution, leveraging Broadcom’s BroadSAFE® technology to provide unparalleled platform security via Silicon Root of Trust (RoT). Broadcom is the first Ethernet Adapter vendor to store authentication key and code in silicon to protect clients from maliciously modified firmware.
• Broadcom’s TruManage™ enhances server manageability, network management, and security for data center deployments. TruManage supports widely deployed management standards including DMTF NC-SI, MCTP, PLDM, and SPDM specifications.
• Support for SR-IOV which bypasses the hypervisor, reducing the latency by removing data copies and context switches between VM address space and hypervisor address space, when transmitting or receiving data over the network. The implementation supports 802.1Qbg Edge Virtual Bridging (EVB).
• Support for Data Center Bridging (DCB), including IEEE 802.1Qbb Priority based Flow Control (PFC) and 802.1Qaz Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS). DCB technology allows the device to provide lossless data delivery, prioritize low latency traffic, and share bandwidth among data center physical links.
• In-band Network Telemetry features provide end-to-end real-time monitoring capability, enabling data center operators to fine tune their networks for maximum performance.

The adapter has the following technical specifications:

• Based on the Broadcom BCM57508 (2-port) controller
• Supports 100Gb/s connectivity; other speeds currently not supported
• PCIe 4.0 x16 host interface
• Available adapter form factors:
  • PCIe low profile form factor
  • OCP 3.0 SFF form factor
• Supports Message Signal Interrupt (MSI-X)
• Interrupt coalescing
• Two QSFP56 external connectors supporting a transceiver, direct-attach copper (DAC) cable or active optical cable (AOC).
• Network boot - PXE, UEFI
• Support for PXE boot (Wake-on-LAN (WOL) are not supported)
• iSCSI boot is only supported via server UEFI; iSCSI boot is not supported by the adapter in legacy mode
• Fully compliant with the SFF-8402 standard
• Networking Features
  • Jumbo frames (up to 9600-Byte)
  • 3x flow control
  • Link Aggregation (802.3ad)
  • Virtual LANs-802.1q VLAN tagging
  • Configurable Flow Acceleration
  • Advanced Congestion Avoidance
  • IEEE 1588 and Time Sync
  • Forward Error Correction Clause 74, Clause 91 support over 25 Gbps
• Performance Features
  • 100M Packet Per Second
  • Low latency
  • Bidirectional wire speed throughput
• Stateless Offload Features
  • TCP, UDP, IPv4, IPv6 checksum offloads
  • Large Send Offload (LSO)
  • Receive Segment Coalescing
  • TCP Segmentation offload (TSO)
  • Large Receive Offload (LRO)
  • Generic Receive Offload (GRO)
  • Receive Side Scaling (RSS)
  • Transmit Side Scaling (TSS)
  • Header-Payload Split
  • Accelerated Received Flow Steering (aRFS)
• Virtualization
  • vSwitch Acceleration
  • NetQueue, VMQueue, and Multiqueue
  • PCI SIG SR-IOV compliant with support for 1024 Virtual Functions
  • Virtual NIC (vNIC) / Network Partitioning (NPAR) with support for up to 16 Physical Functions
  • VXLAN-aware stateless offloads
  • NVGRE-aware stateless offloads
  • Geneve-aware stateless offloads
  • IP-in-IP-aware stateless offloads
  • GRE-aware stateless offloads
  • Per Virtual Function (VF) statistics
  • Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB)
  • Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA)
  • MAC/VLAN filtering and Mirroring
  • VF Isolation, Source pruning, Anti-spoofing checks
  • Stateless and packet steering offloads per VF
• RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)
  • RoCEv2
  • Data Center Bridging with RoCE
  • Reliable Connection (RC) Queue Pair
  • Unreliable Datagram (UD) Queue Pair
  • Raw Ethertype Queue Pair
  • Up to 1 million Queue Pairs
  • Up to 64K Shared Receive Queues
  • Up to 1 million Completion Queues
  • Up to 1 million Memory Regions and Memory Windows
  • Up to 1 million Protection Domains
  • Up to 256 outstanding RDMA Reads or Atomics per Queue Pair
  • Congestion Avoidance (hardware-based flows tracking and rate adjustment)
  • Fast Memory Register
  • Linux OFED 3.5 and later
  • MS-Windows Network Direct Kernel Provider Interface and SMBDirect
  • MS-Windows Network Direct Service Provider Interface
  • GPU Direct RDMA
  • MPI
• Integrated Flow Processing
  • Exact Match Flow Lookup
  • Wildcard Match Flow Lookup
  • VLAN insertion/deletion
  • VLAN PRI Edits
  • NAT/NAPT
  • Tunnel Encapsulation/De-capsulation
  • Flow tracking and aging
  • Mirroring
  • Metering
  • Flow counters/statistics
  • Custom tunnel header support
  • Connection tracking
• Data Center Bridging
  • Priority-based flow control (PFC; IEEE 802.1Qbb)
  • Enhanced transmission selection (ETS; IEEE 802.1Qaz)
  • Quantized Congestion Notification (QCN; IEEE 802.1Qau)
  • Data Center Bridging Capability eXchange (DCBX; IEEE 802.1Qaz)
  • Up to 8 traffic classes per port; fully DCB compliant per 802.1Qbb
• Manageability
  • TruManage Technology based on Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) standards and protocols, support for NC-SI, MCTP, PLDM, and SPDM specifications
  • Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) – MCTP/SMBus 2.0 and MCTP/PCIe VDM
  • NC-SI – 1.1 spec compliance, both NC-SI/RBT and NC-SI/MCTP supported
  • PLDM – Monitoring and control, Firmware Update, NIC Model
  • SPDM 1.1 support for device attestation and firmware measurements
  • NIC Inventory, Monitoring and Control
  • Temperature reporting
  • Out-Of-Band Firmware update
  • Link and Media Management
  • In-Band Network Telemetry
• Power Saving
  • ACPI compliant power management
  • PCI Express Active State Power Management (ASPM)
  • PCI Express eCLKREQ support
  • PCI Express unused lane powered down

The following tables list the ThinkSystem servers that are compatible.

The following table lists the supported operating systems:

• ThinkSystem Broadcom 57508 100GbE QSFP56 2-port PCIe 4 Ethernet Adapter, 4XC7A08297
• ThinkSystem Broadcom 57508 100GbE QSFP56 2-Port OCP Ethernet Adapter, 4XC7A08243

The PCIe adapter has the following dimensions:

• Length: 167 mm (6.6 in.)
• Height: 63 mm (2.5 in)

The OCP adapter has the following dimensions:

• Width: 76 mm (3 in.)
• Depth: 115 mm (4.5 in.)

The adapter is supported in the following environment:

• Temperature (operating): 0 to 55 °C (32 to 131 °F)
• Temperature (storage): -40 to 65 °C (-40 to 149 °F)
• Humidity: 5 to 95% non-condensing

One-year limited warranty. When installed in a supported server, these adapters assume the server’s base warranty and any warranty upgrade.

The adapter conforms to the following standards:

• EN 55022:2010 + AC:2011 Class B (CE EU)
• EN 55024 Class B (EU)
• CFR47, Part 15 Class B (USA FCC)
• ICES-003 Class B (Canada)
• CNS13438 Class B (BSMI Taiwan)
• RRL KN22 Class B (S. Korea)
• KN24 (ESD) (S. Korea)
• V-3 / 2014 / 04 (VCCI Japan)
• EN 60950-1
• UL 60950-1
• CTUVus UL
• CSA 22.2 No. 950
• CNS14336 Class B
• ICES 003
• UL 1977 (connector safety)
• UL 796 (PCB wiring safety)
• UL 94 (flammability of parts)

For more information, see the following resources:

• Networking Options for ThinkSystem Servers
  https://lenovopress.com/lp0765-networking-options-for-thinksystem-servers
• Lenovo ServerProven compatibility information:
  http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/serverproven/