ThinkSystem Intel E810-DA2 and E810-DA4 10/25GbE SFP28 Ethernet Adapters

The ThinkSystem Intel E810-DA2 and E810-DA4 10/25GbE SFP28 network adapters improve application efficiency and network performance with innovative and versatile capabilities. With two or four 25GbE SFP28 ports and key performance optimizations, the E810 adapters supports solutions across Cloud, Enterprise, and Communications. The adapters are available in PCIe low profile and OCP 3.0 form factors.

The following figure shows the ThinkSystem Intel E810-DA2 10/25GbE SFP28 2-Port PCIe Ethernet Adapter.

Figure 1. ThinkSystem Intel E810-DA2 10/25GbE SFP28 2-Port PCIe Ethernet Adapter

The Intel E810 adapter offers excellent small packet performance, and offers virtualization features with support for GENEVE, VXLAN, NVGRE offloads, DPDK, SR-IOV, and VMDq protocols.

The following table provides the ordering part numbers and feature codes for the Intel E810 adapters.

The option part numbers includes the following items:

• One Intel Ethernet adapter
• Two-port PCIe adapters: Full-height (3U) bracket attached with low-profile (2U) bracket included in the box
• Four-port PCIe adapters: Full-height (3U) bracket attached
• Documentation

Note: The adapters ship without any SFP28 transceivers or direct attach cables. These items must be ordered separately as listed in the following section.

The following figure shows the E810-DA4 4-Port PCIe Adapter.

Figure 2. ThinkSystem Intel E810-DA4 10/25GbE SFP28 4-Port PCIe Ethernet Adapter

The Intel E810 adapters have empty SFP28 cages for connectivity. The adapter either supports connections to a 10 Gb or 25 Gb switch or can share a connection to a 100 Gb switch using a 4:1 breakout cable.

The following table lists the supported transceivers.

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

Performance optimizations for Cloud, Enterprise, and Storage deployments

• Application Device Queues (ADQ) provides dedicated traffic queues to reduce latency and increase application throughput
• Dynamic Device Personalization enables protocol- specific traffic acceleration to improve packet processing efficiency and reduce CPU overhead
• iWARP and RoCEv2 support provides high-speed, low-latency, high-throughput connectivity for storage targets and initiators

Accelerated packet processing for Communications workloads

• Enhanced Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) support increases packet processing speeds
• Dynamic Device Personalization enables protocol- specific traffic acceleration and reduces CPU overhead for emerging high-bandwidth workloads
• IEEE 1588 PTP v2 support enables precise clock synchronization across 5G RAN deployments

Application Device Queues (ADQ) for Predictability at Scale

As modern data centers scale, a key challenge is to provide scalable, predictable application-level performance. ADQ technology improves performance scalability and predictability by dedicating queues to key workloads, delivering predictable high performance through dramatically reduced jitter.    

Increasing the predictability of application response times by lowering jitter enables more servers to be assigned to a task and can allow more users to access the system, providing a better end-user experience. Even applications that are not large scale can benefit from higher consistency, enabling them to meet service-level agreements (SLAs) more easily.    

ADQ enables application-specific data steering, signaling, and rate limiting using an optimized application thread to device data path. This ability to dedicate queues and shape network traffic not only increases performance, it reduces latency and improves throughput.

Improve Packet Processing Efficiency with Dynamic Device Personalization (DDP)

DDP customizable packet filtering, along with enhanced DPDK, support advanced packet forwarding and highly-efficient packet processing for both Cloud and NFV workloads.

The Intel E810 adapter firmware loads an enhanced DDP profile with many workload-specific protocols at driver initialization for greater flexibility. When multiple Intel E810 adapters are present in a system, the pipeline on each adapter can be programmed independently with a different DDP profile.

IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP)

Intel E810 adapters support both IEEE 1588 PTP v1 and v2 with two-step option. The products provide increased accuracy at single-digit nanosecond level, and can report the reception time for every packet. This level of timing accuracy can help ensure tight synchronization across network deployments ranging from 5G RAN to financial services, industrial automation, and energy monitoring.

Increase Throughput and Lower Latency with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)

RDMA provides high throughput and low-latency performance for modern high-speed Ethernet by eliminating three major sources of networking overhead: TCP/IP stack process, memory copies, and application context switches. Intel E810 adapters support all major storage transport protocols, including iWARP, RoCEv2, and NVMe over TCP.

RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet): RoCEv2 substitutes the InfiniBand physical layer and data link layer with Ethernet, operates on top of UDP/IP, and is routable over IP networks.

iWARP, IETF standard protocols based: Delivers RDMA on top of the pervasive TCP/IP protocol. iWARP RDMA runs over standard network and transport layers and works with all Ethernet network infrastructure. TCP provides flow control and congestion management and does not require a lossless Ethernet network. iWARP is a highly routable and scalable RDMA implementation.

Protect, Detect, and Recover

Zero Trust is a security design strategy centered on the belief that organizations, by default, should not automatically trust any request for system access. This includes requests coming from outside, as well as inside its perimeters. Zero Trust demands that every access request be verified before granting access.

The Intel E810 adapters implement a design philosophy of platform resiliency with 3 attributes compliant with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, including NIST 800-193 Platform Firmware Resiliency Guidelines: Protect, Detect and Recover. By design, the Hardware Root of Trust in the adapters protect the firmware and critical device settings with authentication for every access. Signed firmware updates and the Hardware Root of Trust protects and verifies critical device settings with built-in corruption detection and automated device recovery. Together these features ensure the device safely returns to its originally programmed state.

The Intel E810 adapters have the following specifications:

Form factor:

• 2-port PCIe adapters: Low profile adapter
• 4-port PCIe adapters: Full-height half-length adapter
• OCP adapters: OCP 3.0 SFF adapter

Host Interface

• E810-DA2 (2-port) adapters: PCIe Gen4 or Gen3 x8 host interface (x8 physical connection)
• E810-DA4 (4-port) adapters: PCIe Gen4 or Gen3 x16 host interface (x16 physical connection)
• Concurrency for 256 non-posted requests

Software Interface

• Base mode VF compatibility with Intel® Adaptive Virtual Functions Specification
• Tx/Rx Queues
  • 2048 Tx queues and 2048 Rx queues
  • Dynamic allocation of queues to functions and VSIs
• Interrupts
  • 2048 interrupts vectors, allocated in a flexible manner to queues and other causes
  • Multiple interrupt moderation schemes
  • 20M interrupts/sec
• Control Queues (a.k.a. Admin Queues)
  • Mailbox Queues for PF-VF and driver-driver
  • Admin Queues for Software-Firmware control flows
  • Sideband Queues for Software to access IPs inside the E810
• 256 Tx Doorbell (DB) Queues
• 512 Tx Completion Queues
• Quanta Descriptor (QD) Queue per Tx queue. Quanta information is also embedded in the Tx doorbell
• Programmable Rx descriptor fields

Packet Processing

• Enhanced Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK)
• General
  • Stages of parsing, switching, ACLs, classification, packet modification
  • Programmable packet processing pipeline
  • Profile based
  • Programmable actions
  • Propagation of priorities between stages
• Parser
  • Parses up to 504B from packet header
  • Parse Graph based
  • Session-based parsing
  • Programmable parse engine
• Binary Classifier (VEB Switch)
  • 768 switch ports (VSIs)
  • Programmable forwarding rules
  • Storm Control
• ACLs
  • 8K programmable TCAM entries
  • Tiling capability to n*40b width
• Classification Filters
  • Hash-based statistical distribution
  • Intel® Ethernet Flow Director (Intel® Ethernet FD) flow-based classification
  • Flow-based identification of iWARP and RoCE flows
  • Programmable rules
• Modifier
  • Insert (Tx), remove (Rx), and modify of packet VLANs
  • L3 and L4 checksums and CRC

Virtualization

• Host virtualization via VMDQ and SR-IOV
• Up to 256 SR-IOV Virtual Functions
• Stateless offloads for tunneled packets (network virtualization support)
• Malicious VF protection
• Virtual machine load balancing (VMLB)
• Advanced packet filtering
• VLAN support with VLAN tag insertion, stripping and packet filtering for up to 4096 VLAN tags
• VxLAN, GENEVE, NVGRE, MPLS, VxLAN-GPE with Network Service Headers (NSH)
• Intel® Ethernet Adaptive Virtual Function drivers

RDMA

• iWARP and RoCEv2
• 256K Queue Pairs (QPs)
• Send Queue Push Mode

Quality of Service (QoS)

• WFQ Transmit scheduler with nine programmable layers
• Pipeline sharing and starvation avoidance
• QoS via 802.1p PCP or Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) value
• Packet shaping

Manageability

• SMBus operating at up to 1Mb/s
• OCP 3.0 adapter: DMTF-compliant NC-SI 1.1 Interface at 100Mb/s
• MCTP over PCIe and SMBus
• Enterprise-level management schemes via local BMC
• SNMP and RMON statistic counters
• Watchdog timer
• PLDM over MCTP; PLDM Monitoring; PLDM firmware update; PLDM for RDE
• Firmware Management Protocol support

Power Management

• Supports PCI power management states D3hot and D3cold

Time Synchronization

• Time stamp with each Rx packet
• Selective time stamps for Tx packets
• IEEE 1588 PTP v1 and v2
• Time synchronization signaling with other local platform ingredients

Pre-Boot

• Signed UEFI option ROM compatible with HTTPS boot
• PXE boot support

Security

• Hardware-based Root of Trust
• Authentication on NVM Read and Power On
• Built-in detection of firmware/critical setting corruption with automated device recovery

The following tables list the ThinkSystem servers that are compatible.

Note: The use of both an Intel E810 network adapter and an X350 HBA/RAID adapter (9350, 5350 and 4350) is currently not supported in ThinkSystem servers. For details see Support Tip HT513226. Planned support for this combination of adapters is 2Q/2024.

The following tables list the supported operating systems for the adapters:

• ThinkSystem Intel E810-DA2 10/25GbE SFP28 2-port PCIe Ethernet Adapter, 4XC7A08295
• ThinkSystem Intel E810-DA2 10/25GbE SFP28 2-port OCP Ethernet Adapter, 4XC7A08294

The 2-port PCIe adapters have a Low Profile form factor with the following dimensions:

• Length: 168 mm (6.6 in.)
• Height: 69 mm (2.7 in.)

The 4-port PCIe adapters have a Full Height Half Length form factor

The OCP adapter has the following dimensions:

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

The E810 adapters are supported in the following environment:

• Operating temperature: 0 to 55 °C (32 to 131 °F)
• Storage temperature: -40 °C to 70 °C (-40 °F to 158 °F)
• Relative humidity (non-operating): 10% to 90%

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:

• FCC B
• UL
• CE
• VCCI
• BSMI
• RCM
• KCC

For more information, see the following resources:

• Networking Options for ThinkSystem Servers
  https://lenovopress.com/lp0765-networking-options-for-thinksystem-servers
• Intel Product page for E810-XXVDA2 PCIe adapter
  https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/network-io/ethernet/ethernet-adapters/ethernet-800-series-network-adapters/e810-xxvda2.html
• Intel Product page for E810-XXVDA2 OCP adapter
  https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/network-io/ethernet/ethernet-adapters/ethernet-800-series-network-adapters/e810-xxvda2-ocp-3.html
• Lenovo ServerProven compatibility information
  http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/serverproven