Ethernet and converged network adapters from Emulex

The company’s new OneConnect® OCe14104 and OCm14000-OCP adapters bring industry-leading protocol offloads, small-packet performance, and server power savings that Emulex adapters are known for. When combined with the recent release of new Emulex OCe14000 10GBASE-T PCIe Ethernet and Converged Network Adapters, the Emulex OneConnect I/O connectivity portfolio provides a full range of form factors and network bandwidth for customers looking to optimise the deployment of new Web-scale applications, virtualised environments and software-defined infrastructures. Additionally, Emulex Ethernet Network Adapters were shown to have a latency advantage of up to 5:1 over Intel’s latest Ethernet adapters (X710 10GbE and XL710 40GbE adapters) in a recent Demartek Evaluation Report.


Hyperscale computing is one of the fastest-growing segments in IT today, and is characterised by data centre architectures focused on improving total cost of ownership, energy efficiency, and reducing complexity in the scalable computing space. The OCP mezzanine adapter specification enables various network connectivity configurations and was developed as an open standard by a community of engineers as part of the OCP Foundation. Emulex OCm14000-OCP adapters provided advanced capabilities for hyperscale customers such as Network Virtualisation and Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN), Network Virtualisation using Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE), Single-Root I/O Virtualisation (SR-IOV), and protocol support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) or block storage (iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet) on Emulex OneConnect CNAs.

“One of our overriding goals as a company is to enable high performance networking for our customers, regardless of the server form factor that they have chosen,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing, Emulex. “Emulex’s unified architecture, when combined with enterprise capabilities such as overlay networking and high performance protocol offloads, ensures that organisations can realise predictable performance across a variety of demanding applications and workloads. These new adapters expand our addressable market, with increased bandwidth and port density, particularly for hyperscale customers.”

With this announcement, Emulex has also made available a major, new 10.4 software release to the market, providing the following key capabilities:

Telco Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV): Linux Poll Mode Driver (PMD) for Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) support, providing telecom equipment manufacturers and telecom operators with an optimised solution to reduce cost and scale operations by transitioning to open server platforms
RSS with VMware NetQueue: Support for receive side scaling (RSS), a network driver technology that enables the efficient distribution of incoming TCP traffic across multiple cores in multi-core processor systems, particularly in software-defined networking (SDN) environments, makes it possible to support higher network traffic loads than would be possible on a single core. This new capability joins current RSS and vRSS support for Microsoft Windows Server VMQ and Dynamic VMQ environments.

SDN Offload support for RHEL 7.x and SLES 12: Hardware offload support of VXLAN for the latest releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Novel SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), preserving precious server resources for application workloads.

Expanded RoCE support: The 10.4 release includes tech previews of iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER) and Linux Network File System (NFS) over RoCE on the latest versions of RHEL. In addition, Quantised Congestion Notification (QCN) support, to manage network congestion while running RoCE, has been added.