Intel X710DA2 User Manual

Product Brief

Intel® Ethernet Converged
Network Adapter
X710 DA-2/DA-4

Dual and Quad-port 10GbE adapters with Hardware

Optimization and Ooads 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, exibilty 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 ooads 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 ooads, 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 ooads

such as Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) and
Flexible Port Partitioning, using SR-IOV for networking

trac 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. Trac
handling is ooaded to the network controller,
delivering the benets of port partitioning with little to
no administrative overhead by the IT sta.

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/O­related 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 Ooads: These stateless ooads preserve
application performance for overlay networks, and the

network trac 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 ltering. The acceleration features,

along with enhanced Data Plane Development Kit
(DPDK), support advanced packet forwarding and high

ecient 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 specication. 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 trac steering capability built into the
adapter. It consists of a large number of ow
anity lters that direct receive packets by their ows
to queues for classication, load balancing, and
matching between ows and CPU cores.

Steering trac into specic queues can eliminate

context switching required within the CPU. As a result,

Intel® Ethernet FD signicantly increases the number of

transactions per second and reduces latency for cloud
applications like memcached.

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