Features and specifications

The adapters have the following features:

• Two or four 10/100/1000 copper ports with RJ45 for Cat 5e/6 cabling
• Based on Intel 82580 ASIC (quad-port MAC/PHY controller)
• PCIe 2.0 x4 host interface
• Low-profile card form factor
• Wake on LAN support
• Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) boot support
• VLAN support with VLAN tag insertion, stripping, and packet filtering for up to 4096 VLAN tags
• iSCSI boot support (built-in software iSCSI initiator)
• iSCSI support with native operating system initiators
• Jumbo frame support
• Intel I/O Acceleration Technology (I/OAT) acceleration
• Intel Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) support for VMware with eight queues per port
• TCP/IP checksum offload
• TCP/IP segmentation offload / large-send offload support

Intel I/O Acceleration Technology (Intel I/OAT) is a suite of features that improves data acceleration across the platform, from networking devices to the chipset and processors, which helps to improve system performance and application response times. The suite of features includes:

• Intel QuickData Technology: Provides the Direct Memory Access (DMA) engine, which moves data using the chipset instead of the CPU.
• Direct Cache Access (DCA): Enables the adapter to prefetch data from the memory cache, thereby avoiding cache misses and improving application response times.
• MSI-X: 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).
• Receive Side Scaling (RSS): Directs the interrupts to a specific processor core based on the application’s address.

Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) reduces I/O impact on the Hypervisor in a virtualized server by performing data sorting and coalescing in the network silicon. VMDq technology makes use of multiple queues in the network controller. As data packets enter the network adapter, they are sorted, and packets traveling to the same destination (or virtual machine) are grouped together in a single queue. The packets are then sent to the Hypervisor, which directs them to their respective virtual machines. Relieving the Hypervisor of packet filtering and sorting improves overall CPU usage and throughput levels.

The adapters have complete iSCSI support for proven native OS and VMM iSCSI initiators as well as iSCSI boot. Historically, CRC32C computation has degraded system performance, but now with the CRC instruction set included in the latest Intel Xeon processors, CRC validation is possible with minimal impact to network throughput while delivering data integrity.

The adapters support the following IEEE standards:

• IEEE 802.3ad (link aggregation control protocol)
• IEEE 802.1Q VLANs
• IEEE 1588 Precision Time Control Protocol
• IEEE 802.3 2005 flow control support
• IEEE 802.1p