Summary

New PowerEdge servers with 3rd Generation Intel Xeon scalable processors were made to support dense workloads, such as machine learning, data analytics and supercomputing. These types of heavy-duty computing require strong networking performance to deliver a fast and consistent I/O experience. Intel has released 800 Series network adapters to supplement these high-caliber workloads. This 1-page DfD will explain what the 800 Series network adapters are, and how they provide premium networking performance to the datacenter.

Overview

Intel has released the Ethernet 800 Series network adapters alongside their 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® scalable processors. The 800 Series adapters on new Dell EMC PowerEdge servers provide storage performance over the network that approaches performance readouts of direct-attached storage. PowerEdge customers seeking to support dense workloads, such as ML/DL, data analytics and supercomputing, should consider using the 800 Series network adapters over RDMA protocols for adequate networking performance.

Key Features

• ADQ (Application Device Ques) allows users to assign ques to key workloads. ADQ technology increases throughput/predictability and reduces latency/jitter for assigned que groups

• DDP (Dynamic Device Personalization) allows users to customize packet filtering for Cloud and NFV workloads- improving packet processing efficiency

• RDMA iWARP and RoCEv2 support provides high speed and low latency connectivity by eliminating three major sources of overhead; TCP/IP stack process, memory copies and application context switches

• PCIe Gen4 support allows network bandwidth to increase by ~2x

• 25GbE dual port support to increase networking speeds and bandwidths

Performance for 100Gb 800 Series Network Adapter

A performance study was conducted to compare the networking IOPS for NVMe drives on a PowerEdge R740xd. The study compared locally attached NVMe drives with network attached NVMe drives mounted through NVMe over Fabrics using RDMA over Ethernet on Intel E810 network adapters. Figure 1 shows that for four NVMe drives, the IOPS readouts are nearly identical. Six and eight drive configurations have up to ~15 percent networking performance variation. This indicates that although locally attached storage typically yields the best performance, NVMe over Fabrics network attached storage using the E810 network adapter is an excellent alternative when PCIe lanes cannot be dedicated for a locally attached NVMe connection.

*To learn more about the Intel Ethernet 800 Series, visit intel.com/ethernet

Figure 1 – NVMe IOPS for E810 adapter (over iWARP/RoCEv2) vs. direct attached