Lenovo 00MM860 User Manual

Intel X550 10 Gb Ethernet 10GBASE-T Adapters

Product Guide

The Intel X550 10GBASE-T Adapter is a low cost, low power 10 GbE performance adapter suitable for all
data center applications. With support for standard CAT 6a cabling with RJ45 connectors, the X550 offers
a low barrier of entry to 10 Gb Ethernet networking.

The following figure shows the Intel X550-T2 Dual Port 10GBase-T Adapter.

Figure 1. Intel X550-T2 Dual Port 10GBase-T Adapter

Did you know?

The Intel X550 is the newest innovation in Intel’s adapter family to drive 10 GbE into the broad server
market. This adapter hosts Intel’s latest Ethernet ASIC, the Intel Ethernet Controller X550, a low-cost
single-chip 10GBASE-T solution for today’s server platforms.

Click here to check for updates

Intel X550 10 Gb Ethernet 10GBASE-T Adapters 1

Part number information

The following table provides the ordering part numbers and feature codes for the Intel X550 adapter.

Table 1. Ordering part numbers and feature codes

Part number Feature code Description

System x and ThinkSystem adapters

00MM850 ATRY Intel X550-T1 Single Port 10GBase-T Adapter

00MM860 ATPX Intel X550-T2 Dual Port 10GBase-T Adapter

The adapter option part numbers includes the following items:

One Intel 10 Gb Ethernet adapter with a full-height (3U) bracket attached

Low-profile (2U) bracket included in the box

Quick Install Guide

Other documentation

The following figure shows the single-port X550-T1 adapter.

Figure 2. Intel X550-T1 single-port adapter

Intel X550 10 Gb Ethernet 10GBASE-T Adapters 2

Features

The Intel X550 adapter has the following features:

Supports Intel Virtualization Technology for connectivity (VT-c), I/O virtualization advances network
connectivity used in today’s servers to more efficient models by providing Flexible Port Partitioning
(FPP), multiple Tx/Rx queues, Tx queue rate-limiting, and on-controller QoS functionality that is
useful for both virtual and non-virtual server deployments.

Supports Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) for NIC-based VM queue sorting, enabling efficient
hypervisor-based switching. VMDq reduces I/O impact on the hypervisor in a virtualized server by
performing data sorting and coalescing in the network adapter.

Supports SR-IOV for direct assignment - NIC-based isolation and switching for various virtual
station instances enabling optimal CPU usage in virtualized environment.

Provides virtual bridging support that delivers both host-side and switch-side control and
management of virtualized I/O as well as the following modes of virtualized operation:

VEPA: IEEE 802.1Qbg support for Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator.
VEB: Virtual Ethernet Bridge support with Intel VT.

Supports VXLAN/NVGRE Hardware Offloads, stateless offloads that preserve application
performance for overlay networks. With these offloads, it is possible to distribute network traffic
across CPU cores. At the same time, the X550 offloads LSO, GSO, and checksum from the host
software, which reduces CPU overhead.

Flexible Port Partitioning (FPP), based on the SR-IOV specification, enables virtual Ethernet
controllers that can be used by a Linux host directly or assigned directly to virtual machines for
hypervisor virtual switch bypass. FPP enables the assignment of up to 64 Linux host processes or
virtual machines per port to virtual functions. FPP can be used to control the partitioning of the
bandwidth across multiple virtual functions. FPP can also provide balanced QoS by giving each
assigned virtual function equal access to 10 Gb/s of bandwidth.

MSI-X interrupts support minimizes the impact of I/O interrupts by load balancing interrupts across
multiple processor cores.

Low-Latency Interrupts: Allows the adapter to bypass the automatic moderation of time intervals
between the interrupts (based on the sensitivity of the incoming data).

Load balancing on multiple processors, which increases performance on multiprocessor systems by
efficiently balancing network loads across processor cores when used with Receive Side Scaling
(RSS) from Microsoft or Scalable I/O on Linux.

Header Splits and Replication in Receive helps the driver focus on the relevant part of the packet
without needing to parse it.

Multiple queues allow packet handling without the waiting/buffer overflow, which provides efficient
packet prioritization.

Mobile and cloud application acceleration: Intel’s Data Plan Development Kit (DPDK) delivers an
open driver where users can fine-tune small packet performance.

Offload features:

IP, TCP, and UDP checksum offload (IPv4 and IPv6)
TCP and UDP segmentation/large send offload (IPv4 and IPv6)
IPsec offload
Receive Side Scaling for Windows and Scalable I/O for Linux (IPv4, IPv6, and TCP/ UDP)

IEEE 802.1Q VLAN support with VLAN tag insertion, with stripping and packet filtering for up to
4096 VLAN tags.

IEEE 802.3x flow control support.

IEEE 802.1p Class of Service/Quality of Service.

Support for Advanced Packet Filtering.

Intel X550 10 Gb Ethernet 10GBASE-T Adapters 3

Jumbo frames support (up to 9,500 bytes).

Teaming support:

Adapter Fault Tolerance (AFT)
Switch Fault Tolerance (SFT)
Adaptive Load Balancing (ALB)
Virtual Machine Load Balancing (VMLB)
IEEE 802.3ad (link aggregation control protocol)

Support for both UEFI and PXE boot.

Technical specifications

The Intel X550 adapter has the following specifications:

One or Two 10GBASE-T RJ-45 ports

Supports 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, and 10 Gbps speeds

Standard PCIe low-profile card form factor

PCIe 3.0 x4 host interface

Power consumption (10GBASE-T): 13.0 W (maximum), 11.2 (typical)

Standards supported

The Intel X550 adapter supports the following standards:

IEEE 802.1p Class of Service (CoS) traffic prioritization
IEEE 802.1Q VLAN tagging
IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation Control Protocol
IEEE 802.3x Full-duplex flow control
IEEE 802.3u 100BASE-TX Fast Ethernet
IEEE 802.3ab 1000BASE-T copper twisted pair Gigabit Ethernet
IEEE 802.3an 10GBASE-T copper twisted pair 10 Gb Ethernet
IEEE 802.1Qbg Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator
IEEE 802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) support
IEEE 1588 Precision clock synchronization protocol

Intel X550 10 Gb Ethernet 10GBASE-T Adapters 4

Server support - ThinkSystem

The following table lists the ThinkSystem servers that are compatible.

Table 2. ThinkSystem server support

Description and part number

E 1S Intel 2S Intel AMD 4S Intel

Dense/

Blade

Intel X550-T1 Single Port 10GBase-T
Adapter, 00MM850

N Y Y Y Y Y N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N

Intel X550-T2 Dual Port 10GBase-T
Adapter, 00MM860

N Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y N Y Y Y Y Y Y Y N N N

Server support - System x

The following tables list the System x servers that are compatible with the Intel X550 adapter.

Support for System x and dense servers with Xeon E5/E7 v4 and E3 v5 processors

Table 3. Support for System x and dense servers with Xeon E5/E7 v4 and E5 v5 processors

Part
number Description

00MM850 Intel X550-T1 Single Port 10GBase-T Adapter N N Y Y Y Y Y

00MM860 Intel X550-T2 Dual Port 10GBase-T Adapter Y Y Y Y Y Y Y

SE350 (7Z46/7D1X)

ST50 (7Y48/7Y50)

ST250 (7Y45/7Y46)

SR150 (7Y54)

SR250 (7Y51/7Y52)

ST550 (7X09/7X10)

SR530 (7X07/7X08)

SR550 (7X03/7X04)

SR570 (7Y02/7Y03)

SR590 (7X98/7X99)

SR630 (7X01/7X02)

SR650 (7X05/7X06)

SR670 (7Y36/7Y37/7Y38)

SR635 (7Y98/7Y99)

SR655 (7Y00/7Z01)

SR850 (7X18/7X19)

SR850P (7D2F/2D2G)

SR860 (7X69/7X70)

SR950 (7X11/12/13)

SD530 (7X21)

SD650 (7X58)

SN550 (7X16)

SN850 (7X15)

x3250 M6 (3943)

x3250 M6 (3633)

x3550 M5 (8869)

x3650 M5 (8871)

x3850 X6/x3950 X6 (6241, E7 v4)

nx360 M5 (5465, E5-2600 v4)

sd350 (5493)

Intel X550 10 Gb Ethernet 10GBASE-T Adapters 5