PRODUCT BRIEF
Intel® Ethernet Converged
Network Adapter
X710 DA-2/DA-4
Dual and Quad-port 10GbE adapters with Hardware
Optimization and Offloads for the Rapid Provisioning of Networks in an Agile Data Center
Key Features
•PCI Express* (PCIe) v3.0, x8
•Network Virtualization offloads including VXLAN, GENEVE, NVGRE, MPLS, and VXLAN-GPE with Network Service
Headers (NSH)
•Intel® Ethernet Flow Director for hardware based application traffic steering
•Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) optimized for efficient packet processing
•Excellent small packet performance for network appliances and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)
•Intelligent offloads to enable high performance on servers with Intel® Xeon® Processors
•I/O virtualization innovations for maximum performance in a virtualized server
Overview
The Intel® Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X710 addresses the demanding needs of an agile data center by providing unmatched features for both server and network virtualization, flexibilty for LAN and SAN networks, and proven, reliable performance.
The Intel® Ethernet 700 Series Network Adapters. These adapters are the foundation for server connectivity, providing broad interoperability, critical performance optimizations, and increased agility for Telecommunications, Cloud, and Enterprise IT network solutions.
•Interoperability - Multiple speeds and media types for broad compatibility backed by extensive testing and validation.
•Optimization - Intelligent offloads and accelerators to unlock network performance in servers with Intel® Xeon® processors.
•Agility - Both Kernel and Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) drivers for scalable packet processing.
Built on more than 35 years of continuous Ethernet innovations, the Intel® Ethernet 700 Series delivers networking performance across a wide range of network port speeds through intelligent offloads, sophisticated packet processing, and quality open source drivers.
All Intel® Ethernet 700 Series Network Adapters include these feature-rich technologies:
Flexible and Scalable I/O for Virtualized Infrastructures
Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT), delivers outstanding I/O performance in virtualized
server environments.
I/O bottlenecks are reduced through intelligent offloads such as Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) and Flexible Port Partitioning, using SR-IOV for networking traffic per Virtual Machine (VM), enabling near-native performance and VM scalability. Host-based features supported include:
VMDq for Emulated Path: VMDq, enables a hypervisor to represent a single network port as multiple network ports that can be assigned to the individual VMs. Traffic handling is offloaded to the network controller, delivering the benefits of port partitioning with little to no administrative overhead by the IT staff.
SR-IOV for Direct Assignment: Adapter-based isolation and switching for various virtual station instances enables optimal CPU usage in virtualized environments.
•With up to 128 Virtual Functions (VF)s, each VF can support a unique and separate data path for I/O- related functions within the PCI Express* hierarchy.
•Use of SR-IOV with a networking device, for example, allows the bandwidth of a single port (function) to be partitioned into smaller slices that can be allocated to specific VMs or guests, via a standard interface.
Enhanced Network Virtualization Overlays (NVO)
Network virtualization has changed the way networking is done in the data center, delivering accelerations across a wide range of
tunneling methods.
VXLAN, GENEVE, NVGRE, MPLS, and VXLAN-GPE with
NSH Offloads: These stateless offloads preserve application performance for overlay networks, and the network traffic can be distributed across CPU cores, increasing network throughput.
Greater Intelligence and Performance for NFV
A combination of hardware and software acceleration features, such as Application Device Queues (ADq) and Dynamic Device Personalization (DDP), enable
customizable packet filtering. The acceleration features, along with enhanced Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), support advanced packet forwarding and high efficient packet processing for both Cloud and Network
Functions Virtualization (NFV) workloads.
•ADq is a fast queuing and signaling technique for high-speed I/O that improves performance and limits performance jitter.
•DDP enables a method to change the packet processing pipeline by applying a profile package to the Intel® Ethernet 700 Series Network Adapter at runtime—resulting in improvements in throughput, latency and reduced CPU loads.
•DPDK provides a programming framework for Intel® processors and enables faster development of high-speed data packet networking applications.
Flexible Port Partitioning (FPP)
FPP leverages the PCI-SIG SR-IOV specification. Virtual controllers can be used by the Linux* host directly and/or assigned to virtual machines.
•Assign up to 63 Linux host processes or virtual machines per port to virtual functions.
•Control the partitioning of 10GbE bandwidth across multiple dedicated network resources, ensuring balanced QoS by giving each assigned virtual controller equal access to 10Gbs of bandwidth.
Network administrators can also rate limit each of these services to control how much of the 10GbE pipe is available to each process.
Advanced Traffic Steering
Intel® Ethernet Flow Director (Intel® Ethernet FD) is an advanced traffic steering capability built into the adapter. It consists of a large number of flow
affinity filters that direct receive packets by their flows to queues for classification, load balancing, and matching between flows and CPU cores.
Steering traffic into specific queues can eliminate context switching required within the CPU. As a result,
Intel® Ethernet FD significantly increases the number of transactions per second and reduces latency for cloud applications like memcached.
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