Cavium 25/50GbE Adapter Technology Will Power HPE Synergy

Cavium, Inc., a provider of semiconductor products that enable secure processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking, announced that its FastLinQ Ethernet 25/50GbE technology will power HPE Synergy480 and 660 Gen10 compute modules.

The introduction for this class of I/O connectivity for the Synergy Gen 9 and Gen 10 compute modules provides density, cost and power benefits and enables acceleration of enterprise, telco and cloud applications.

FastLinQ NICs are built to bridge traditional and new IT with the agility, speed and continuous delivery needed for applications.

Based on the 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, performance compute and traditional enterprise applications.

25/50GbE Adapter Technology for HPE
The Synergy 6810C 25/50Gb Ethernet adapter, powered by Cavium’s QL45604 controller, delivers high bandwidth and low latency connectivity for the Synergy platform. This dual-port 25/50Gb adapter provides 2.5 times the available server I/O bandwidth for 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 reduced to increase application performance.

“Cavium is a leading provider for I/O connectivity for a broad range of HPE servers,” said Rajneesh Gaur, VP and GM, 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 25/50GbE connectivity within HPE Synergy, the industry’s first platform for composable infrastructure, enables our customers to greatly improve application performance and VM scalability, while 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, VP of server options, HPE.

Key Ethernet technologies and features include:

Synergy 6810C 25/50Gb Ethernet adapter supports up to 100Gb/s 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, e-commerce and other applications.
Server Virtualization features that include Single Root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) for low latency 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 Virtualization 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.
Sanitization (Secure User Data Erase) renders user and configuration data on the NIC irretrievable so that NICs can be safely repurposed or disposed.

The HPE Synergy 6810C 25/50GbE adapter was announced by HPE on July 11, 2017 and will be shipping in the third quarter of 2017.

More information: Cavium FastLinQ Ethernet Portfolio for HPE Servers