Cavium Introduces New 25GbE NIC Adapters

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Cavium Inc. has come out with a new family of 10/25/40/50GbE NIC (News - Alert) adapters with Universal RDMA. The company says these products are the first of their kind.

These new FastLinQ 41000 Series adapters support concurrent RoCE, RoCEv2, and iWARP. They feature zero-touch automatic speed and FEC selection. And they align with the new 25GbE standard that leverages cloud architectures, multicore processors, and NVMe flash storage to deliver 2.5 times the performance of previously available solutions and significantly reduce the cost and power per gigabit.

“The data center market is well into a ramp for deployment of 25/50GbE, with significant deployments in large cloud service providers looking to migrate from 10GbE server connectivity to 25GbE server connectivity with 100GbE switching. Mainstream enterprises are expected to follow later in 2017,” said Cliff Grossner, research director and advisor for the data center research practice at IHS (News - Alert) Markit. “In a recent IHS Markit report, we discovered that 25GE ports are expected to represent 31 percent of adapter ports shipped by 2021. The introduction of 25GbE adapters targeting cloud, telco NFV, and enterprise specific use cases are an important and timely event advancing the networking market, driving new opportunity.”

The FastLinQ adapters coupled with server and networking platforms allow enterprise data centers to optimize their infrastructure costs and increase virtual machine density by employing concurrent SR-IOV and NIC Partitioning technology that provides acceleration and quality of service for tenant workloads and infrastructure traffic, Cavium explains.  The new adapters also provide full network function virtualization, excellent small packet performance, and integration into DPDK and OpenStack for deployment and management, the company adds. 

The FastLinQ 41000 Series of adapters is available now from Cavium. Leading tier 1 OEMs and ODMs around the world will also be offering these products soon.