IBM CONNECTX-2 Network Card User Manual


 
Mellanox ConnectX-2 Dual Port 10 GbE Adapter for IBM System x 2
Part number information
The part number to order this card is shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Ordering part number and feature code
Description Part number Feature code
Mellanox ConnectX-2 Dual Port 10 GbE Adapter for IBM System x 81Y9990 A1M4
The adapter has two empty SFP+ cages that support either SFP+ SR transceivers or twin-ax
direct-attached copper (DAC) cables as listed in Table 2.
Table 2. Supported transceivers and direct-attach copper (DAC) cables
Description Part number Feature code
IBM 10Gb SFP+ SR Optical Transceiver (BN-CKM-SP-SR) 44W4408 4942
IBM/BNT 10Gb SFP+ SR Optical Transceiver 46C3447 Not available
IBM/Brocade 10Gb SFP+ SR Optical Transceiver (IB-000180) 45W2411 2117
IBM/Brocade 10Gb SFP+ SR Optical Transceiver 49Y4216 0069
IBM/QLogic 10Gb SFP+ SR Optical Transceiver (SFP10-SR50-IBMX-BK) 49Y4218 0064
IBM Twinax Direct Attach Cable (DAC) - 1m 45W2398 2711
IBM Twinax Direct Attach Cable (DAC) - 3m 45W2408 2731
IBM Twinax Direct Attach Cable (DAC) - 5m 45W3039 2751
Features and benefits
The Mellanox ConnectX-2 Dual Port 10 GbE Adapter for IBM System x has the following features:
Performance:
Based on ConnectX-2 EN technology, the PCI Express 2.0 x8 adapter provides a high level of throughput
performance for all network environments by removing I/O bottlenecks in mainstream servers that are
limiting application performance. Servers supporting PCI Express 2.0 with 5 GTps can fully utilize both 10
Gbps ports and achieve up to 40 Gbps duplex bandwidth. Hardware-based stateless offload engines
handle the TCP/UDP/IP segmentation, reassembly, and checksum calculations that would otherwise
burden the host processor. These offload technologies are fully compatible with Microsoft RSS and
NetDMA.
RDMA over Ethernet (RDMAoE) further accelerates application run time. The RDMAoE specification
provides efficient data transfer with very low latencies on lossless Ethernet networks. RDMAoE enables
lowest latency memory transaction, with less than 2µs at full bandwidth with small message size. This
allows very high volume, transaction intensive applications typical of financial market firms and other
industries where speed of data delivery is paramount to take advantage. With Mellanox ConnectX-2 Dual
Port 10 Gbe Adapter, high frequency transaction applications are able to access trading information with
shorter times, making sure the trading servers are able to respond first to any new market data and
market inefficiencies, while the higher throughput enables higher volume trading, maximizing liquidity and
profitability.