Sometimes you just need a 25GbE adapter, and one that we have not highlighted is part of the QLogic lineage. The Marvell FastLinQ QL41232 is a 1/10/25GbE OCP NIC 3.0 adapter that supports both iWARP and RoCEv2 and can be found in the ecosystems of major OEMs.
Marvell FastLinQ QL41232 25GbE OCP NIC 3.0 Hardware Overview
Here is the adapter. You will notice that the OCP NIC 3.0 adapter is actually made by Marvell. QLogic was acquired by Cavium around the time we were doing the original ThunderX review in 2016. Cavium was in turn acquired by Marvell in 2018. We actually covered the FastLinQ 41000 series launch back in 2017!
Here we can see the two SFP28 cages with link activity lights.
Lenovo is using the SFF with Pull Tab OCP NIC 3.0 form factor. This is our preferred form factor, allowing for the most accessible service. To learn more about the differences, see our OCP NIC 3.0 form factor guide. As a quick note, some of the other brands of these will use other faceplates.
The rear has a protective cover.
We are using the Lenovo part number 01KR588 here.
Dell also has these. If you want to look at HPE, some part numbers are: P11710-001 or P10118-B21. You may have seen that we used the Lenovo card without issue in our Tyan GC70-B8033 1U AMD EPYC Milan Server Review so these do not seem to be completely vendor locked.
Marvell FastLinQ QL41232 Installed
Installing the Marvell FastLinQ was easy. In Ubuntu, the qede driver was loaded out-of-the-box.
These are still PCIe Gen3 adapters, which means they need an x8 connection to the host.
We used these in both Lenovo and Tyan servers and found that we could use cheap DACs and 10G/25G optics, but we did not get to test a broad spectrum. When we mean cheap, we mean like 10Gtek cheap on Amazon. (Affiliate link.)
These NICs come with a ton of features, so they are worth going into the huge spec list if you are interested in them.
Marvell FastLinQ QL41232 Performance
Performance from the NIC is just as we would expect at 25GbE speeds:
We blasted the NIC also at 10GbE speeds:
Pushing wire-rate traffic is not difficult for a NIC like this. We did not test at 1G speeds but that is another speed that this supports, albeit at only 4% of the maximum rated speed for the NIC.
Final Words
A lot of the development for things like 25GbE NICs happened years ago as the 25GbE standard ages. The QL41000 series entered the market about two years after the Mellanox (now NVIDIA) ConnectX-4 Lx that STH and many of our readers used a lot of in the early 25GbE days and before Intel really got behind RoCEv2. That makes this a decent 10GbE/ 25GbE adapter because it offers a lot of features that earlier generations lacked.
These days, the adapters are relatively easy to get, both new and used. We have focused more on NVIDIA, Broadcom, and Intel NICs over the past few years, and some of Marvell’s lower-end NICs like the Aquantia products, but we thought it would be worth taking a quick look at this one. For those who want to delve into the specs, here they are:
