Solarflare SFN5162F 2x10GbE SFP+ Performant Adapter

The Solarflare SFN5162F 2x10GbE SFP+ Performant Adapter, part of the Solarflare Performant Server family of adapters, enables application performance leadership by delivering the industry’s lowest latency along with full line-rate performance. Featuring a rich set of stateless offloads, these adapters provide efficient acceleration of the most demanding network protocol tasks.

Figure 1 shows the adapters. The SFN5162F and SFN6122F are physically identical.

Figure 1. Solarflare SFN5162F MR and SFN6122F LL Dual Port 10GbE SFP+ Adapters

With a latency of less than 3 microseconds, the Solarflare SFN6122F LL Dual Port 10GbE SFP+ Adapter provides significant performance benefits when used with an operating system compatible with the OpenOnload drivers.

Table 1 provides the ordering part numbers and feature codes for the Solarflare adapters.

Table 1. Ordering part numbers and feature codes

* Withdrawn from marketing

The adapter option part numbers includes the following items:

• One Solarflare 10 GbE adapter with a full height PCIe bracket attached
• One low profile PCIe bracket (included in the box)
• Support CD
• Important Notices Flyer

Note: The adapters ship without any SFP+ transceivers or direct attach cables. These items need to be ordered separately (see Table 2 and Table 3 for details).

The Solarflare SFN5162F and SFN6122F Dual Port 10GbE SFP+ Adapters have two empty SFP+ cages that support SFP+ SR transceivers and Twinax direct attached copper cables, as listed in Table 2 and Table 3.

Table 2. Supported SFP+ transceivers

Table 3 lists the supported direct attach copper (DAC) cables.

Table 3. Supported direct attach copper cables

The Solarflare SFN5162F MR (midrange) and SFN6122F LL (low-latency) adapters deliver dual-port, line-rate 10 Gbps throughput for moving large amounts of data and eliminating server I/O bottlenecks. The SFN5162F combines excellent performance and outstanding value for general business 10 GbE applications. The SFN6122F adapter delivers industry-leading network performance with ultra-low latency at the highest message rates.

The Solarflare SFN5162F and SFN6122F Adapters have the following common features:

• Delivers industry-leading performance, providing high throughput, low latency, and high CPU efficiency, which improves the performance of network communications, network-attached storage, and remote file system access.
• Suitable for applications such as email, database, OLTP, data mining, web serving, and big data.
• Includes Solarflare's unique hardware-accelerated virtual channel architecture. Each virtual channel provides an independent channel between the network adapter and host software, allowing network I/O processing to be distributed efficiently over multiple CPU cores. With 1024 virtual channels per port, I/O performance scales as the number of CPU cores and virtual machines increase.

  Note: In the Solarflare documentation, the virtual channel feature is referred to as vNIC. This feature is different from the Virtual Fabric vNIC capability.

• Supports Receive Flow Steering (RFS) acceleration, which improves processing efficiency by steering received packets to the CPU core that is running the application that consumes those packets.
• Accelerates guest applications in leading hypervisors by efficiently distributing virtual machine network I/O traffic across multiple CPU cores with supporting NetQueue and VMQ in VMware, and Microsoft VMQ in Hyper-V.
• At less than 5 watts, the SFN5162F makes a power-efficient 10G network not only possible, but it can save thousands of dollars of operating costs for a typical data center.
• Graphical user interface and scriptable command-line interface for ease of management.

In addition, the Solarflare SFN6122F LL Dual Port 10GbE SFP+ Adapter supports the Solarflare OpenOnload application acceleration middleware on Linux operating systems. OpenOnload bypasses the network stack in the Linux kernel by dedicating a virtual channel to each accelerated application.

OpenOnload enables the following capabilities:

• Suitable for the most demanding, latency-sensitive applications in environments requiring the highest message rates.
• Delivers ultra-low latency and high throughput even as message rates increase.
• Enables accelerated application performance through TCP/IP, UDP, and multicast acceleration.
• Streamlines and reduces interrupts, context switches, and data copies.
• Reduces the processing that is associated with networking and improves processor core scaling.
• Reduces latency from less than 6 µs to less than 3 µs.
• Increases message rates by 300% or more.
• Binary compatibility with industry standard APIs, so no software modifications are needed, and OpenOnlod seamlessly integrates in to the existing infrastructure.
• A standards-based solution using TCP/IP and UDP, so no specialized protocols are needed.

Note: Solarflare OpenOnload runs only on non-Xen Linux distributions. Windows and VMware are not supported.

The adapters have the following common specifications:

• Based on the Solarflare Solarstorm SFC9020 controller.
• Two 10GbE SFP+ ports with support for optical SFP+ modules and Direct Attach Copper (DAC) cables.
• Full line-rate performance across all ports.
• Very low latency:
  • SFN5162F: 5.4 µs
  • SFN6122F without OpenOnload: 5.4 µs
  • SFN6122F with OpenOnload: 2.3 µs (TCP), 2.4 µs (UDP)
• Low-profile form factor.
• PCI Express 2.0 x8 Gen 2.0 host interface at 5.0 GTps for full, 40 Gbps bidirectional bandwidth.
• Jumbo Frames support (9216 byte frames).
• IEEE 802.1q VLAN support provides enhanced network management and efficiency.
• Support for VMware NetQueue and Microsoft VMQ improves network performance in virtualized environments.
• Support for NIC teaming.
• IEEE 802.3x flow control support.
• Receive Side Scaling (RSS) with 2048 virtual channels (1024 per port) distributes IPv4/IPv6 loads across CPU cores.
• Accelerated Receive Flow Steering (RFS) intelligently aligns I/O processing with application processing to a single CPU core by using on-chip advanced packet filtering.
• TCP, IP, and UDP checksum offload.
• IP flow filtering enables the hardware to steer packets that are based on IP, TCP, and UDP header contents to a virtual channel.
• MAC address filtering enables the hardware to steer packets that are based on the MAC address to a virtual channel.
• Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI) and MSI-X support maximizes server processing performance by reducing CPU impact and lowering interrupt latency.
• Support Large Send Offload (LSO), Giant Send offload (GSO) TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO), and Large Receive Offload (LRO) for improved adapter performance and reduced CPU utilization.
• Power consumption (typical):
  • SFN5162F: 4.9 W
  • SFN6122F: 5.9 W

The adapters currently have the following restrictions:

• No support for SR-IOV.
• No support for iSCSI boot or PXE boot.
• No UEFI support. The adapters boot by using legacy BIOS only.

• PCI Express Base Specification, rev. 2.0
• PCI Express Card Electromechanical Specification, rev. 2.0
• PCI Bus Power Management Interface Specification, rev. 1.2
• IEEE 802.3ae (10 Gb Ethernet)
• IEEE 802.1Q (VLAN)
• IEEE 802.3ad (Link Aggregation)
• IEEE 802.1p (Priority Encoding)
• IEEE 802.3x (Flow Control)
• IPv4 (RFQ 791)
• IPv6 (RFC 2460)
• IEEE 802.3ae 10GBASE-SR short range fiber optics 10 Gb Ethernet
• 10GSFP+Cu SFP+ Direct Attach copper
• Jumbo frames

The Solarflare adapters are supported on the System x servers that are listed in the following tables.

The following tables list the System x servers that are compatible.

For the latest information about the System x servers that support each adapter, see ServerProven:
http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/serverproven/xseries/lan/matrix.shtml

The Solarflare adapters support the following operating systems:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server Edition
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server with Xen x64 Edition
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server x64 Edition
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server Edition
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server x64 Edition
• SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 11 for AMD64/EM64T
• SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 11 for x86
• SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 11 with Xen for AMD64/EM64T
• SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 12
• VMware vSphere 5.0 (ESXi)
• VMware vSphere 5.1 (ESXi)
• VMware vSphere 6.0 (ESXi)

Solarflare OpenOnload is supported by the Solarflare SFN6122F LL Dual Port 10GbE SFP+ Adapter only on non-Xen versions of Linux:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 for x86
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 for AMD64/EM64T
• SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 12
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server Edition
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server x64 Edition
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server Edition
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server x64 Edition

Download the OpenOnload softtware from (no cost registration required):
https://support.solarflare.com/index.php?option=com_cognidox&view=categories&Itemid=25

For the latest information about the specific versions and service packs supported, see ServerProven:
http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/serverproven/xseries/lan/matrix.shtml

Select the check mark that is associated with the server in question to see the operating system support details.

The adapters have the following physical specifications (approximate):

• Length: 134 mm (5.3 in.)
• Width: 69 mm (2.7 in.)
• Depth: Standard 120 mm (4.725 in.); Low profile 79 mm (3.12 in.)
• Weight: 99 g (3.3 oz.)

Shipping box dimensions (approximate):

• Height: 189 mm (7.5 in.)
• Width: 90 mm (3.5 in.)
• Depth: 38 mm (1.5 in.)
• Weight: 205 g (7.0 oz.)

These adapters are supported in the following environment:

• Operating temperature: 0 - 55 °C (32 - 131 °F)
• Storage temperature: -20 - 70 °C (-4 - 158 °F)
• Relative humidity (operating): 10% - 90%
• Relative humidity (storage): 5% - 95%

One-year limited warranty. When installed in a System x server, these cards assume your system’s base warranty and any warranty upgrade.

The adapters conform to the following standards:

• EMI
• EMC
• EN55022
• EN55024
• EN60950 / CE
• FCC Part 15 Class B
• UL 1950 / 60950-1
• CSA C22.2 60950-1-07 2nd Ed
• VCCI
• AS/NZS CISPR22:2006 and CISPR24:1997 + A1:2001 + A2:2002
• RRL for MIC (KCC)
• BSMI
• UL 94-/V
• RoHS compliant

The adapters support end-to-end 10 GbE connections to the top-of-rack Ethernet switches from Lenovo Networking that are listed in the following table.

The maximum cable distance (optical) is 300 m using OM3 multi-mode fibre.

For more information, see the Product Guides in the Top-of-rack switches categories:
http://lenovopress.com/networking/tor/10gb?rt=product-guide

For more information, see the following documents:

• US Announcement Letter:
  http://ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=dd&subtype=ca&&htmlfid=897/ENUS113-082
• Networking adapters for System x product page
  http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/systems/servers/options/systemx/networking/adapters/
• System x Configuration and Options Guide:
  http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/cog/
• Device drivers, tools, and Solarflare Server Adapter User's Guide (no cost for registration is required):
  https://support.solarflare.com/index.php?option=com_cognidox&view=categories&Itemid=25
• Product Guide: Solarflare SFN7122F 2x10 GbE SFP+ Flareon Ultra Adapter
  https://lenovopress.com/tips1156-solarflare-sfn7122f