HPE 700741-B21 Datasheet

Solution brief

Enhance your network
scalability and flexibility

Network partitioning for HPE ProLiant servers

Good news for your data center network

With NPAR you can:

• Simplify physical connectivity to
HPE ProLiant servers

• Consolidate adapter requirements

• Streamline the network

• Reduce implementation time

• Lower acquisition costs

HPE and Cavium now deliver adapter-based virtualization
with network partitioning for HPE FlexFabric and Ethernet
adapters in HPE ProLiant servers.

Network scalability
you’ve been waiting for

Today’s networking eiciency challenge

The explosion of applications and rich media
content, coupled with increased virtualization
and cloud computing growth, place heavy
demands on your networking eiciency.

Your choice in solutions can trigger challenges
too. To handle increased workloads, your
organization may have transitioned from
1 Gigabit Ethernet (1GbE) networks to
10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) networks. This
bandwidth increase can provide significant
performance, cost reduction and consolidation
benefits. However, as you continue to move
from 1GbE to 10GbE networks, traic flow
for application workloads may not be able
to utilize the entire bandwidth available in a
10GbE connection.

If yours is like many organizations, you may
have built your infrastructure by adding
separate servers, networks, and storage
capacity for each application workload. While
these siloed application deployments can help
simplify management, you are also left with
excessive pockets of unused I/O capacity and
ineicient network sprawl.

Network and storage convergence plus
server virtualization have helped address
these problems. But the challenge with
10GbE networks comes with provisioning

the appropriate bandwidth and data center
resources to meet varying application
demands in both physical and virtual
environments.

Powerful problem solver

Working together, HPE and Cavium can
help eliminate these networking eiciency
problems with a network interface card (NIC)
partitioning, or network partitioning (NPAR),
in both physical and virtual environments.
This approach enables your administrators
to consolidate multiple individual adapters
and split up the network pipe to divide
and reallocate bandwidth and resources as
needed at the adapter level. NPAR reduces
the number of separate adapters needed to
stream dierent traic types, including Fibre
Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE),
and iSCSI for HPE ProLiant blade, rack, and
tower servers with 10GbE adapters.

How NPAR works

As an operating system and switch-agnostic
technology, NPAR allows you to reduce the
number of I/O adapters required to support
dierent application workloads by virtualizing
those I/O connections across high bandwidth
channels like 10GbE. Traditional best practices
require separate LAN or SAN connections for
dierent aspects of application workloads.

Solution brief

HPE FlexFabric 53x Series 10GbE adapters
and HPE CN1100R Converged Network
Adapters (CNA) already support widely used
SAN protocols like FCoE and iSCSI. This means
your IT administrators can readily reduce
the number of adapters needed for separate
protocols, including Fibre Channel and Ethernet
adapters. With NPAR, these adapters can deliver
basic converged operations and partition
your network bandwidth further into multiple
virtual connections.

Flex NIC 1 40%

Flex NIC 2

20%

10 Gb
port

Flex NIC 3

Flex NIC 4

Virtual connections (also known as physical
functions in NPAR) enable HPE ProLiant
rack and tower servers with bandwidth
management capabilities for each adapter. For
example, a 10GbE port can be provisioned to
operate as three separate physical functions:
a full 8 Gb FCoE stream and two separated
1GbE streams, such as management or
VMotion. Dual-port 10GbE adapters deliver
more flexibility to provision ports, reducing
the need for multiple physical adapters
performing the same functions.

Administrators can assign physical functions
independently from each other. By reducing
multiple physical adapters and increasing
converged operations with NPAR, you can
improve budget and bandwidth with
HPE 53x Series adapters.

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20%

20%

Streamline the network

NPAR helps simplify your data center and
your network and storage infrastructure
in several key ways. For example, your
administrators often have to purchase many
cables to use when connecting servers to
LANS and SANs. NPAR network partitioning
provides an alternative by consolidating
Ethernet connections—and iSCSI or Fibre
Channel connections when using Converged
or FlexFabric adapters—onto a significantly
reduced number of ports.

HPE 53x Series and HPE StoreFabric
CN1100R adapters from Cavium support this
functionality. Like switches, NPAR reduces the
number of cables without adding workloads
on the network. Better yet, NPAR uses your
existing adapter, eliminating the need to add
switches and cables.

Benefits

NPAR from HPE and Cavium is designed to
oer flexibility and scalability advantages over
standard connectivity:

• Reduce network sprawl—A single dual-port
HPE 53x Series adapter and HPE StoreFabric
CN1100R CNAs can replace up to eight
connections in a single server. This
consolidates infrastructure onto much less
equipment, simplifies management, reduces
costs, and uses less energy and facility space.

• Improve network scalability—With a reduced
number of network devices and cables, you
can easily scale data center networks and add
servers and network devices to meet growing
IT demands. NPAR is switch-agnostic,
working with standard Ethernet switches,
converged top-of-rack (ToR) switches and
pass-through devices.

• Simplify administration—NPAR reduces the
number of physical adapters to manage
and enables your administrators to add or
replace network cards or move workloads
from one partition to another within
minutes. This in turn simplifies management
task self-suiciency.

• Fine-tune resource allocation—NPAR
helps improve bandwidth allocation
and the utilization of that allocation in
both virtualized and non-virtualized
environments. The problem: virtualization
can reduce the number of physical
servers but also increase I/O demand for
each server. The solution: using 10GbE
connectivity with NPAR network partitioning
provides four functions per port on a single
integrated network adapter built into the
server. This lets the server eiciently handle
bandwidth requirements. You can also easily
plug in additional devices to meet and
fine-tune growing bandwidth requirements.

• Enhanced CPU utilization—When virtualizing
servers, system administrators can use
the OS to create multiple virtual network
connections. However, this approach
requires CPU resources. Using NPAR
oloads that responsibility from the OS and
processor to the adapter itself, freeing up
CPU resources to run more applications or
manage more virtual machines.

Boost network eiciency

HPE and Cavium have a long partnership
history delivering innovative networking
solutions. Now, our NPAR approach makes
migrating to today’s powerful 10GbE
networks an easy and compelling option for
your organizations. So you can better utilize
10GbE networks to reap the performance,
eiciency, and lower total cost of ownership
(TCO) benef its.

Learn more at

hpe.com/servers/ProLiantNICs

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without notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

4AA5-4072ENW, September 2017, Rev. 3