Cavium FastLinQ 41000 Series 10GbE and 25GbE Adapters Launched

The new Cavium FastLinQ 41000 series is being launched aimed at general purpose compute and storage server. The FastLinQ 41000 series supports traditional 10GbE but also SFP28 25GbE networking. One of the unique features of the Cavium FastLinQ 41000 series is its ability to support both RoCE and iWARP RDMA networking. That is a big deal. Some higher-end fabrics we are about to see explode only support one or another. For example, Intel is pushing Omni-Path which uses iWARP RDMA. If you are looking for a 25GbE solution, this is a new entry in the market.

Cavium FastLinQ 41000 Series Overview

Here is an excerpt about the Cavium FastLinQ 41000 series from the company’s site:

The FastLinQ 41000 Series Intelligent Ethernet family includes 25GbE and 10GbE adapters with SFP/SFP28 optical or direct attach copper (DAC) and 10GBASE-T RJ45 connections that support LAN (TCP/IP) traffic at full line-rate speeds and key features for enterprise-class data centers and private/public cloud deployments:

• Scalable networks with 2.5X bandwidth for 25GbE when compared to 10GbE and more than 2X port density when compared to 40GbE
• Optimum server performance with PCI Express (PCIe) Gen3 x8 (10GbE/25GbE)
• Low latency and high throughput with Universal RDMA with support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), RoCE v2 and Internet wide area RDMA Protocol (iWARP)
• Adaptive link controls for seamless zero-touch interoperability with industry-wide 10/25/100GbE switches and cables using FastLinQ SmartAN technology
• Enhanced CPU efficiency for networking tunneling with stateless offloads for VXLAN, NVGRE, GRE and GENEVE
• Advanced server virtualization features such as NPAR and SR-IOV
• High-performance network storage with iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER), Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabric (NVMe-oF), Network File System over RDMA (NFSoRDMA), Server Message Block over RDMA (SMB Direct), Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), Linux Lustre, and VMware para-virtualized RDMA (pvRDMA)
• Support for UEFI Secure Boot safeguards the FastLinQ NIC and ensures no rogue drivers are being executed on start-up, preventing the injection of malware.
• Simplified deployment, troubleshooting and lifecycle management using the QConvergeConsole (QCC) GUI, QCC PowerKit, QLogic Control Suite CLI, QCC vCenter GUI/ESXCLI Plug-ins, and OpenStack integration
• Enhanced management interface with Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) over PCIe support
• Network boot support for PreBoot Execution Environment (PXE) 2.0, iSCSI remote boot, and UEFI boot