Lenovo Flex System CN4058S Virtual Fabric Adapter FCoE Upgrade - Feature-on-Demand (FoD) - for Flex System CN4058S 8-port 10Gb Virtual Fabric Adapter
- Multi-protocol support for 10 GbE
- Virtual NIC emulation
- Full hardware storage offloads
- Lenovo Features on Demand (FoD)
- Emulex Virtual Network Acceleration (VNeX) technology support
The Flex System CN4058S 8-port 10Gb Virtual Fabric Adapter supports up to four virtual NIC (vNIC) devices per port, where each physical 10 GbE port can be divided into four virtual ports with flexible bandwidth allocation. These adapters also feature RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) capability, and support iSCSI, and FCoE protocols with the addition of a Features on Demand (FoD). With hardware protocol offloads for TCP/IP and FCoE, the CN4058S provides maximum bandwidth with minimum use of CPU resources and enables more VMs per server, which provides greater cost saving to optimize return on investment. With up to eight ports, the CN4058S in particular makes full use of the capabilities of all supported Ethernet switches in the Flex System portfolio.
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Multi-protocol support for 10 GbE
The adapters offers two 10 GbE connections and are cost- and performance-optimized for integrated and converged infrastructures. They offer a "triple play" of converged data, storage, and low latency RDMA networking on a common Ethernet fabric. The adapters provides customers with a flexible storage protocol option for running heterogeneous workloads on their increasingly converged infrastructures.
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Virtual NIC emulation
The Emulex VFA5 family supports three NIC virtualization modes, right out of the box: Virtual Fabric mode (vNIC1), switch independent mode (vNIC2), and Universal Fabric Port (UFP). With NIC virtualization, each of the two physical ports on the adapter can be logically configured to emulate up to four virtual NIC (vNIC) functions with user-definable bandwidth settings. Additionally, each physical port can simultaneously support a storage protocol (FCoE or iSCSI).
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Full hardware storage offloads
These adapters support an optional FCoE hardware offload engine, which is enabled via Lenovo Features on Demand (FoD). This offload engine accelerates storage protocol processing and delivers up to 1.5 million I/O operations per second (IOPS), which enables the server's processing resources to focus on applications and improves the server's performance.
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Lenovo Features on Demand (FoD)
The adapters use FoD software activation technology. FoD enables the adapters to be initially deployed as a low-cost Ethernet NICs, and then later upgraded in the field to support FCoE or iSCSI hardware offload.
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Emulex Virtual Network Acceleration (VNeX) technology support
Emulex VNeX supports Microsoft supported network virtualization by using generic routing encapsulation (NVGRE) and VMware-supported virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN). These technologies create more logical LANs for traffic isolation that are needed by cloud architectures. Because these protocols increase the processing burden on the server's processor, the adapters have an offload engine that is designed specifically for processing these tags. The resulting benefit is that cloud providers can use the benefits of VxLAN/NVGRE while not being penalized with a reduction in the server's performance.
