Emulex brings high performance enterprise-class 10GbE to the 'masses' 

10GBASE-T is a standard that was created to allow 10GbE traffic to run over low-cost CAT-6 and CAT-6A copper wiring. With the ability to cover distances of up to 100 meters, 10GBASE-T provides an excellent cost effective alternative for connecting servers to top-of-rack switches. The Emulex OCe14102-NT Ethernet Network Adapter provides two ports of low-cost 10GBASE-T, while still offering all of the features that have enabled the Emulex OCe14000 family of Ethernet Network Adapters to gain broad support at more than a dozen different server, storage and system vendors worldwide with the introduction of the latest generation of x86 servers.

“Our new family of 10GBASE-T adapters further expands the Emulex portfolio in the 10GbE market by creating new leadership positions in price and performance, while continuing to provide the enterprise-class features channel partners and enterprises rely on, including overlay networking and high performance storage offloads, as well as full support for PCIe 3.0,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing, Emulex. “As the Demartek Evaluation Report illustrates, Emulex Ethernet and Converged Network Adapters have significant performance and feature advantages over the new Intel X710 10GbE and XL710 40GbE adapters. The introduction of our new PCIe 3.0 10GBASE-T Ethernet Network Adapters provide a further advantage in the breadth of our product line over our competitors, and one more reason for customers to think of Emulex as their choice for Ethernet connectivity.”

As a service to our customers, Emulex recently commissioned Demartek, a third party testing lab, to compare the Emulex OCe14000 series of Ethernet Network Adapters with the latest Intel X710 10GbE and XL710 40GbE adapters. The four key findings from this evaluation included:

· The Emulex OCe14000 family of 10GbE and 40GbE Network Adapters showed up to 5x greater RFC2544 small packet performance compared to the Intel X710/XL710 adapters.
· The Emulex OCe14102 10GbE Network Adapter has 62 per cent lower (better) average TCP latency and 55 per cent lower (better) average UDP latency than the Intel X710 adapter.
· The Intel X710/XL710 adapters are currently missing features necessary for high performance virtualised data centre and cloud network environments, such as Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) overlay networking hardware offloads, Single Root I/O Virtualisation (SR-IOV) support for VMware, and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) support.
· The Intel X710/XL710 adapters use a new i40e driver architecture, which is not compatible with the previous generation Intel IXGBE NIC drivers.

“The importance of networking infrastructure continues to grow as enterprises expand the deployment of virtualised cloud environments, network-centric applications, and complex network topologies,” said Dennis Martin, founder and president, Demartek. “To get the most out of these environments, support for advanced capabilities such as overlay networking protocol offloads, SR-IOV and RDMA over Converged Ethernet are becoming increasingly important. The lack of these features in the latest generation Intel Ethernet adapters, coupled with the performance gaps that we measured, make these Emulex OCe14000 Ethernet Network Adapters an excellent choice for data centre and cloud environments.”

In addition to the performance and feature advantages that are highlighted in the Demartek report, the OCe14102-NT Ethernet Network Adapter brings Emulex’s intelligent offload capabilities to low-cost 10GBASE-T deployments. Emulex hardware offloads can lower overall server power consumption by up to 50 watts per server, combined with increased server CPU availability due to reduced server I/O workload [1]. For large data centres, this can translate into significant operational expenditure (OPEX) savings for power and cooling, as well as improvement in workload density per server when compared to Ethernet adapters that do not possess offload capabilities. The Emulex OCe14102-NT Ethernet Network Adapter is immediately available for customers through Emulex’s worldwide network of distributors and resellers.