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• Storage Performance: Enables competitive
performance with native OS drivers and intelligent
offload for NAS (NFS, SMB), and SAN (iSCSI and FCoE)
A Complete, Unified Networking Solution
Converging data and storage onto one fabric eliminates
the need for multiple adapters, cables and switches.
Furthermore both 10 and 40 gigabit Ethernet provides
the bandwidth to converge these multiple fabrics onto a
single wire. A key capability that makes all this possible
is trac class separation provided by Data Center Bridg-
ing (DCB)
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—providing a one-wire solution with virtual
pipes for the dierent classes of trac:
• Data: Best effort delivery of standard LAN traffic
• Storage: Lossless network for FCoE and iSCSI
• Management: Guaranteed connectivity of data
center IP management
One Adapter, One Price
With the Intel’s adapters, iSCSI and FCoE support are
included in the price of an adapter. There is no need to
purchase multiple adapters or additional licensing for an
X710 adapter. It’s simple and easy. Everything you need
to unify your networking is included in a single SKU. One
Adapter, One Price.
Power Savings
Power eciency is critical to IT specialists as energy
consumption is a real OpEx concern.
• Lowest Power Consumption
The new generation of X710 adapters are power
misers. They deliver double the throughput with only
half the power of the previous X520 generation.
• Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE)
Reduces power consumption during periods of low data
activity. Energy is used to maintain the physical layer
transmitters in a “ready state” to transmit data on the
wire. During periods of low data traffic, EEE sends a
low-power-idle signal to put the transmitters into a “low
power state” saving power and cost. When data needs
to be sent, EEE sends a normal idle signal to wake up the
transmit system before data is due to be sent so there is
no degradation of performance.
Server Virtualization
With Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT), the X710
family of adapters deliver outstanding I/O performance
in virtualized server environments. They reduce I/O bot-
tlenecks by providing intelligent ooads for networking
trac per virtual machine (VM), enabling near-native
performance and VM scalability. The host-based virtual-
ization technologies supported by Intel® VT include:
• VMDq for Emulated Path: Adapter-based VM Queue
sorting enabling efficient hypervisor-based switching
• SR-IOV for Direct Assignment: Adapter-based isolation
and switching for various virtual station instances
enabling optimal CPU usage in virtualized environments
Additionally, X710 adapters provide Virtual Bridging
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support that delivers both host-side and switch-side
control and management of virtualized I/O as well as
the following modes of virtualized operation:
• VEPA
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: IEEE 802.1Qbg support for Virtual Ethernet
Port Aggregator
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• VEB: Virtual Ethernet Bridge support via Intel® VT
Network Virtualization
Network virtualization is the next big trend in creating an
agile data center. The family of X710 adapters are ready
to help you take that next step.
• VXLAN, NVGRE, GENEVE Offloads: These stateless
offloads preserve application performance for overlay
networks. With these offloads it is possible to distribute
network traffic across CPU cores.
At the same time X710 ooads LSO, GSO, and check-
sum from the host software reducing CPU overhead.
Intel® Ethernet Flow Director
Flow Director is an advanced trac steering capability
built into the X710 controller. It consists of a large number
of ow anity lters that direct receive packets by their
ows to queues for classication, load balancing, and
matching between ows and CPU cores. It eli-minates
context switching required within the CPU. As a result,
Flow Director signicantly increasing the number of
transactions per second and reduces latency for cloud
applications like Memcached.
Intelligent Offloads
The Intel Xeon processor family has demonstrated
increased computing performance and increased
integration of key server subsystems generation after
generation. To ooad is to leverage the ever-escalating
computing power of the Xeon processor where appropri-
ate and implementing complementary accelerations in
the network controller—this is what Intel refers to as
“intelligent ooads.” By employing a balanced hybrid
of compute and ooad, intelligent ooads are able
to achieve the optimized point of performance and
eciency. This is most notably observed in the following
usage models:
• TCP Stateless Offloads: Demonstrates leading per-
formance vs. TOE solutions without restricting feature
usage (TOE usage usually requires that key features
be disabled). Supported stateless off- loads include
Checksum, TSO, VMDq, and RSS.
• Host iSCSI/FCoE Initiators: Providing exceptional
performance without the need for full-offload
HBA2 methods.
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