Network & Communication

The Intel® Ethernet Server Adapter I210 builds on Intel's history of excellence in Ethernet Products. This adapter represents the next step in the Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) networking evolution for the enterprise and data centers offering Audio-Video-Bridging (AVB) support, along with power management technologies such as Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) and DMA Coalescing (DMAC).

Audio-Video Bridging (AVB)

The Intel® Ethernet Server Adapter I210 supports IEEE 802.1Qav Audio-Video Bridging (AVB) for customers requiring tightly controlled media stream synchronization, buffering, and reservation. The 802.1Qav is part of the AVB specification that provides a way to guarantee bounded latency and latency variation for time sensitive traffic and includes:

• Timing and synchronization for time-specific applications (802.1AS) Stream Reservation (SR) protocol to guarantee the resources needed for Audio/Video (AV) streams (802.1Qat)
• Forwarding and queueing enhancements for time sensitive streams (802.1Qav).

Performance Optimization

The I210 contains four transmit and four receive queues. These queues offer Error Correcting Memory (ECC) protection for improved data reliability. The adapter efficiently manages packets with minimum latency by combining parallel and pipelined logic architectures optimized for these independent transmit and receive queues. These queues, combined with Receive Side Scaling (RSS) and Message Signal Interrupt Extension (MSI-X) support, optimize the performance on servers with multi-core processors.

Power Management Technologies

Intel has introduced new, Advanced Power Management Technologies (PMTs) that enable enterprises to configure power options on the adapter and more effectively manage power consumption.

Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE)

Supports the IEEE802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard. During periods of low network activity, EEE reduces the power consumption of an Ethernet connection by negotiating with a compliant EEE switch port to transition to a low power idle (LPI) state.

The controller power is reduced by approximately 50 percent of its normal operating power, saving power on the network port and the switch port. When increased network traffic is detected, the controller and the switch quickly come back to full power to handle the increased network traffic. EEE is supported for both 1000BASE-T and 100BASE-TX.

DMA Coalescing

Another power management technology that can reduce power on the server platform is DMA Coalescing (DMAC). Typically, when a packet arrives at the adapter, a DMA request is initiated in order to place the packet into host (or server) memory. This transaction wakes up the processor, memory, and other system components from a lower power state in order to perform the tasks required to handle the incoming packet.

By adding photonics capability to world-leading silicon manufacturing, Intel® is developing a new class of high-speed optical connectivity products.

Intel® Silicon Photonics combines the manufacturing scale and capability of silicon with the power of light onto a single chip. We build silicon-based components that transmit and receive optical signals, moving vast amounts of information at 100 to 1600 Gigabits per second over long distances of up to several kilometers of fiber optic cables.

Today, our pluggable modules connect Ethernet switches in large data centers. As demand for bandwidth increases, silicon photonics co-packaged with switch ASICs will provide the band-width density necessary to scale future data center networks.

• New high-speed I/O connectivity based on photonics
• Intel® wafer-scale manufacturing with hybrid laser
• Platform for future high-density switch integration

What is Silicon Photonics?

Silicon Photonics is a combination of two of the most important inventions of the 20th century the silicon-integrated circuit and the semiconductor laser. With this combination, light has been integrated onto Intel's silicon platform, taking advantage of the bandwidth and reach of optical connectivity, using the scale and technology capability of silicon.

This new technology can reduce cost of ownership and improve the performance of future data center architectures by:

• Enabling high-bandwidth, software-configurable access to compute and storage
• Permitting software defined infrastructure (SDI) deployments to decouple hardware and software resources for disaggregated data centers
• Allowing optical connectivity that interoperates with other technologies, such as Ethernet switches,Smart-NICs, and FPGAs

Designed with the bridgeless Intel® Ethernet Controller I350, this 1GbE adapter delivers performance through industry leading enhancements for both virtualized and iSCSI networking environments.

A suite of hardware assists improves overall system performance by lowering the I/O overhead in virtualized environments. iSCSI simplifies SAN connectivity by eliminating the need for SAN- specific adapters or switches.

This adapter also includes power management technologies such as Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) and DMA Coalescing (DMAC). With advanced Power Management Technologies, customers can configure power options on the adapter and more effectively manage their power consumption.

The Intel® Ethernet I350 Server Adapters includes these featured technologies:

Flexible I/O Virtualization

The Intel® Ethernet I350 adapters include Intel® Virtualization Technology for connectivity (Intel VT-c) to deliver I/O virtualization and Quality of Service (QoS) features designed directly into the I350 controller on the adapter. I/O virtualization advances network connectivity models used in today's servers to more efficient models by providing Flexible Port Partitioning (FPP), multiple Rx/Tx queues, and on-controller QoS functionality that can be used in both virtual and non-virtual server deployments.

By taking advantage of the PCI-SIG SR-IOV specification, Intel® Ethernet products enable Flexible Port Partitioning (FPP). With FPP, virtual controllers can be used by the Linux host directly and/or assigned to virtual machines. With this port partitioning, administrators can create up to eight dedicated networks on a single Ethernet port for use in baremetal and virtualized server deployments.

In a bare-metal Linux server, host processes can be assigned to dedicated network resources to provide traffic isolation and balanced bandwidth allocation.

In a virtualized environment, a VM can be assigned to a virtual controller to reduce the CPU overhead seen when using a software-based network bridge, by offloading network traffic management to the Ethernet controller silicon.

Scalable iSCSI Performance

iSCSI uses Ethernet to carry storage traffic, extending the familiarity and simplicity of Ethernet to storage networking, without the need for SAN-specific adapters or switches. Intel® Ethernet adapters, with built-in iSCSI initiators for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and VMware ESXi platforms, provide a simple, dependable, cost-effective way to connect to LANs and iSCSI SANs.

Intel® Ethernet adapters include hardware-based iSCSI acceleration features that do not require offloading to a proprietary TCP/IP stack. iSCSI acceleration uses large send offload, Receive Side Coalescing and transmit send offloads to help reduce latency and lower CPU utilization. To improve efficiency, MSI-X, Receive-side Scaling and Intel® Ethernet Flow Director, scale I/O processing across multiple CPU cores. Direct memory access (DMA), direct cache access (DCA) and header splitting improve network data processing efficiency, and data center bridging (DCB) supports multiple traffic classes that can be prioritized for iSCSI traffic.

These built-in initiators are broadly tested using multiple generations of operating systems, storage systems, and OS tools to help ensure reliability and ease of use. Standardizing on Intel Ethernet for iSCSI allows administrators to use a single initiator, TCP/IP stack, and a common set of management tools and IT policies.

The Intel® Silicon Photonics 100G CWDM4 (Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing 4-lane) QSFP28 Optical Transceiver is a small form-factor, high speed, and low power consumption product, targeted for use in optical interconnects for data communications applications. The high bandwidth module supports 100GbE optical links over single-mode fiber.

Applications

• Connectivity for large scale cloud and enterprise data centers
• Ethernet switch, router, and client-side telecom interfaces

By adding photonics capability to world-leading silicon manufacturing, Intel® is developing a new class of high-speed optical connectivity products.

Intel® Silicon Photonics combines the manufacturing scale and capability of silicon with the power of light onto a single chip. We build silicon-based components that transmit and receive optical signals, moving vast amounts of information at 100 to 1600 Gigabits per second over long distances of up to several kilometers of fiber optic cables.

Today, our pluggable modules connect Ethernet switches in large data centers. As demand for bandwidth increases, silicon photonics co-packaged with switch ASICs will provide the band-width density necessary to scale future data center networks.

• New high-speed I/O connectivity based on photonics
• Intel® wafer-scale manufacturing with hybrid laser
• Platform for future high-density switch integration

What is Silicon Photonics?

Silicon Photonics is a combination of two of the most important inventions of the 20th century the silicon-integrated circuit and the semiconductor laser. With this combination, light has been integrated onto Intel's silicon platform, taking advantage of the bandwidth and reach of optical connectivity, using the scale and technology capability of silicon.

This new technology can reduce cost of ownership and improve the performance of future datacenter architectures by:

• Enabling high-bandwidth, software-configurable access to compute and storage
• Permitting software defined infrastructure (SDI) deployments to decouple hardware and software resources for disaggregated data centers
• Allowing optical connectivity that interoperates with other technologies, such as Ethernet switches,Smart-NICs, and FPGAs