Intel X722DA2 User Manual

Product Brief

Intel® Ethernet Network
Adapter X722

Dual and Quad –port 10GbE adapters supporting
highly scalable iWARP RDMA for high-throughput,
low-latency, and low-CPU data communication.

Key Features

• iWARP RDMA

• PCI Express* (PCIe) v3.0, x8

• Network Virtualization offloads:
VXLAN, GENEVE, and NVGRE

• 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 Network Adapter X722 features iWARP RDMA for high
data throughput, low-latency workloads and low CPU utilization. The X722
is ideal for Software Dened Storage solutions, NVMe over Fabric
solutions and Virtual Machine Migrations acceleration.

RDMA is a host-ooad, host-bypass technology that enables a low-

latency, high-throughput direct memory-to-memory data communication
between applications over a network.

iWARP extensions to TCP/IP, standardized by the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), eliminate three major sources of networking overhead:
TCP/IP stack process, memory copies, and application context switches.
Based on TCP/IP, iWARP is highly scalable and ideal for Hyper-converged
storage solutions.

The X722 is one of 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 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 with a common

Virtual Function driver 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.

• Up to 128 VFs, each VF can support a unique and
separate data path for I/O related functions within the
PCI Express* hierarchy.

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 per port bandwidth across
multiple dedicated network resources, ensuring
balanced QoS by giving each assigned virtual
controller equal access to the ports bandwidth.

Network administrators can also rate limit each of these
services to control how much of the pipe is available to
each process.

Advanced Trac 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.

• 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

specic VMs or guests, via a standard interface.

Intel® Ethernet Adaptive Virtual Function (Intel®
Ethernet AVF): A virtual function driver that eases

SR-IOV hardware upgrades or changes, and preserves
base mode functionality in hardware and software.
Customers deploying mass-scale VMs or containers for
their network infrastructure now have a common Virtual
Function (VF) driver. This driver supports a Base Mode
and advanced set of features on the Intel® Ethernet

700 Series.

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, and NVGRE: These stateless ooads

preserve application performance for overlay networks,

and the network trac can be distributed across CPU

cores, increasing network throughput.

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