Product guide

Leadership enterprise server with significantly lower cost of ownership in a highly available and
expandable, rack-dense, 1U dual-socket server
Please see the Legal Information section for important notices and information.
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High-Performance Adapter Slots
The x3550 M2 provides two x16 (“by 16”) 8GBps PCIe (PCI Express) Gen 2 high performance
I/O slots help double the performance vs. the previous-generation x3550 for added long-term
investment protection. Each is capable of supporting x1/x4/x8 adapters at full speed. One slot is
full height, half length. The other is low profile. Each is convertible to one PCI-X/133 MHz using
the riser option. High-performance x16 Gen 2 slots are ideal for digital media, 2D graphics
environments
PCI Express is a high-performance, low-latency, next-generation serial I/O bus that is rapidly
replacing the older parallel PCI and PCI-X buses. A x16 PCIe adapter offers approximately eight
times the maximum throughput of a 133MHz PCI-X adapter
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. (A x1 adapter offers throughput
similar to a 66MHz PCI-X slot.)
There is a built-in riser card in x3550 M2 that provides a PCIe connector (x8 connector wired with
x4 lanes) for an internal ServeRAID card. There is no internal tape drive support in x3550 M2.
Dual Gigabit Ethernet Controllers
The x3550 M2 includes two integrated Broadcom 5709 Gigabit Ethernet controllers standard,
for up to 10X higher maximum throughput than a 10/100 Ethernet controller, as well as support
for Jumbo Frames and TOE (TCP Offload Engine).
Jumbo Frames—those larger than the standard frame (packet) size of 1,500 bytes—can be
more efficient, dramatically increasing network performance and reducing server CPU overhead.
TOE helps improve overall system performance by offloading TCP/IP protocol processing from
the system microprocessor to the onboard Ethernet TOE processor. There is no additional
charge for this capability.
It also supports highly secure remote power management using IPMI 2.0, plus Wake on LAN
®
and PXE (Preboot Execution Environment) flash interface. Optional PCI adapters offering failover
and load balancing between adapters are available for added throughput and increased system
availability.
Integrated quad Gb Ethernet ports:
• Up to four (4) Gb Ethernet ports ideal for virtualization and I/O intensive workloads
• 2 ports standard plus two additional ports optional via daughtercard
• Improves system performance by offloading protocol processing from CPU to a separate TOE
engine
• Primary performance improvement for data copying (CPU) where CPU utilization is 90-100%
• The embedded NIC/TOE supports software iSCSI using a Microsoft iSCSI initiator
• Using a software initiator enables offloading the processing of TCP frames with the TOE
engine in the adapter card but the processing of iSCSI packets themselves is not hardware
offloaded at the Broadcom NIC
• Broadcom hardware offloaded iSCSI (using TOE engine) of the iSCSI frames
• iSCSI and RDMA are not supported
Two Broadcom 5709 Gigabit Ethernet controllers (one on-board and one on an optional daughter
card) provide four Gigabit ports supporting IEEE 802.3 for 1000Base-T, 100Base-TX, and
10Base-T applications (802.3, 802.3u, 802.3ab) through a RJ-45 connector to an Ethernet
network over a CAT 5 twisted-pair cable. This controller supports PXE 2.0 remote boot, TCPIP
Offload Engine (TOE), Internet SCSI (iSCSI), Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), and jumbo
frames (9KB). License key will be required to enable iSCSI and RDMA feature. There are two
green LEDs on the connector: Activity LED on the upper left side and Link Status LED on the
upper right side (viewed facing the connector). TOE support on Windows is available today. But it
requires Windows Scalable Network Pack (SNP) installation. Linux has no plan to support TOE at
this time. Please refer to TOE_RDMA_iSCSI.doc for technology details. Internet Protocol version
6 (IPv6) is supported.
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Actual throughput will depend on the adapter vendor’s implementation.