Gigabyte CLNOQ42 Marvell OCP Type 25Gb/s 2-port LAN Card

Overview

GIGABYTE 25GbE SFP28 LAN OCP Type Card

GIGABYTE’s CLNOQ42 dual-port LAN add on card features a Marvell FastLinQ 41202-A2G network controller, providing 25GbE Ethernet connectivity in a compact OCP Type 1 form factor card ideal to use with GIGABYTE’s server products that have an OCP mezzanine slot.

Marvell’s FastLinQ 41000 Series network controllers provide exceptional value in delivering industry-leading features and performance to enable the most efficient and agile software-defined data centers (SDDNs). Designed for the most demanding server and network virtualized environments, the 41000 series adapters enable Universal RDMA (RoCE and iWARP) as well as NPAR, VXLAN/NVGRE/GENEVE, and SR-IOV to boost server CPU efficiency and maximize application performance.

Overlay Networks Support (VXLAN / NVGRE / GENEVE / GRE)

In order to better scale their networks, data center operators often create overlay networks that carry traffic from individual virtual machines over logical tunnels in encapsulated formats such as NVGRE and VXLAN. While this solves network scalability issues, it hides the TCP packet from the hardware offloading engines, placing higher loads on the host CPU. The FastLinQ 41202-A2G controller on GIGABYTE’s CLNOQ42 effectively addresses this by providing advanced NVGRE, VXLAN, GENEVE and GRE hardware offloading engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay protocol headers, enabling the traditional offloads to be performed on the encapsulated traffic for these and other tunneling protocols (MPLS, QinQ, and so on).

RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) Support

GIGABYTE’s CLNOQ42 supports RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) and iWARP (Internet wide area RDMA Protocol) acceleration to deliver low latency, low CPU utilization and high performance on Windows, VMware, and Linux operating systems. FastLinQ 41000 Series controllers have the unique capability to deliver Universal RDMA that enables RoCE, RoCEv2, and iWARP. Marvell Universal RDMA provides the ultimate flexibility in accelerating use cases like Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), Windows Live Migration, VMware PVRDMA and vSAN, NVMe™ over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), CEPHS and NFS over RDMA, and so on. And Marvell’s cutting edge offloading technology increases cluster efficiency and scalability to many thousands of nodes for hyper-converged infrastructure deployments. Customers looking to scale out NVMe-oF can leverage the FastLinQ 41000 Series capabilities of supporting NVMe-oF over TCP (NVMe/TCP) in addition to RDMA transports.

Hardware-Based I/O Virtualization Support

Designed for next-generation server virtualization: GIGABYTE’s CLNOQ42, featuring a Marvell FastLinQ 41202-A2G controller supports today’s most compelling set of powerful networking virtualization features: SR-IOV, NPAR, tunneling offloads (VXLAN, GRE, GENEVE, and NVGRE), and industry-leading performance, thus enhancing the underlying server virtualization features.

• SR-IOV delivers higher performance and lower CPU use with increased virtual machine (VM) scalability.
• Marvell NPAR enables up to 16 physical, switch-agnostic, switch-independent NIC partitions per adapter. Dynamic and fine-grained bandwidth provisioning enables control of network traffic from VMs and hypervisor services.
• Concurrent support for SR-IOV and NPAR enables virtual environments with the choice and flexibility to create an agile virtual server platform.
• Availability of both RSS and TSS allows for more efficient load balancing across multiple CPU cores.