Ethernet adapter technology powers HPE computer modules

Cavium FastLinQ NICs are built from the ground up to bridge traditional and new IT with the agility, speed and continuous delivery needed for today’s applications. Based on the innovative technology from Cavium and HPE, customers can run more demanding workloads and applications that require higher bandwidth and lower latency than existing I/O offerings. This includes hybrid cloud, Big Data, high performance compute and traditional enterprise applications.

Cavium 25/50Gb Ethernet adapter technology for HPE
The HPE Synergy 6810C 25/50Gb Ethernet adapter, powered by Cavium’s QL45604 controller, delivers high bandwidth and low latency connectivity for the HPE Synergy platform. This dual-port 25/50Gb adapter provides 2.5 times the available server I/O bandwidth for HPE Synergy Gen 9 and Gen 10 compute modules vs. previous generation, allowing HPE customers to improve workload performance. With support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), I/O latency is significantly reduced to increase application performance.

"Cavium is a leading provider for I/O connectivity for a broad range of HPE servers," said Rajneesh Gaur, Vice President and General Manager, Ethernet Adapter Group, Cavium. "The introduction of the HPE Synergy 6810C 25/50Gb Ethernet adapter based on Cavium technology brings high-performance and low latency Ethernet connectivity for world-class HPE Synergy composable infrastructure. This is an important milestone in enabling enterprise data centers and service providers to increase operational efficiency and application performance enabling an agile IT infrastructure."

“The ability to provide high-performance 25/50Gb Ethernet connectivity within HPE Synergy, the industry’s first platform for composable infrastructure, enables our customers to greatly improve application performance and virtual machine scalability, while significantly reducing hardware and management complexity. In addition, Cavium’s Ethernet technology supports enhanced security features and secure firmware updates in HPE Gen10 servers, providing customers increased protection against firmware attacks,” said Tom Lattin, Vice President of Server Options for Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Key features:

• HPE Synergy 6810C 25/50Gb Ethernet adapter supports up to 100Gbps bi-directional bandwidth for enhanced network performance.
• Designed to support HPC clusters, computational, financial and other applications requiring low-latency network connectivity with support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE). Also capable of supporting Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol (iWARP) with future firmware upgrade.
• DPDK support provides small packet acceleration capability for telco, ecommerce and other applications.
• Advanced Server Virtualisation features that include Single Root I/O virtualisation (SR-IOV) for low latency high-performance virtual workloads.
• Support for PXE boot, IPV6 and HPE Sea of Sensor 3D Technology to simplify connectivity and improve overall TCO of the network connectivity.
• Acceleration for Networking Virtualisation with Stateless Offloads for tunneling protocols including NVGRE, VxLAN and GRE.

Security features:

• Authenticated updates for NICs validate that signed firmware is correct and trusted to eliminate rogue firmware installation.
• Secure Boot safeguards the NIC and ensures no rogue drivers are being executed on start-up.
• Sanitisation (Secure User Data Erase) renders user and configuration data on the NIC irretrievable so that NICs can be safely repurposed or disposed.