Overview
The PLUS variant of the Flareon Ultra SFN8542 Dual-Port 40GbE QSFP+ Server I/O Adapter adds a suite of enabled software capabilities that provide out-of-the box support for ultra-low-latency Onload-accelerated sockets as well as PPS and PTP time synchronization support.
The SFN8542-PLUS is capable of associating a hardware time-stamp with every incoming and outgoing Ethernet frame for application troubleshooting or performance monitoring. These features make the SFN8542-PLUS the ultra-low-latency Ethernet adapter of choice to deploy as a key component throughout Financial Trading infrastructures where either one or two ports of 40GbE or four ports of 10GbE are required.
CPU-Efficient Networking
The Flareon Ultra SFN8542-PLUS dual-port 40G Ethernet QSFP+ server adapter delivers faster, more efficient processing of network traffic to accelerate a wide range of applications. The SFN8542-PLUS has 16 lanes of PCIe 3.1 minimizing latency and maximizing bus throughput between the adapter and the host. The SFN8542-PLUS can can also be configured as a quad-port 10GbE adapter with one QSFP+ port operating as four 10GbE ports.
Flexibility in Operation
Configured either in 40GbE or 10GbE mode, in a virtualized environment the adapter supports hypervisor bypass via SR-IOV providing virtualized guests with near bare-metal network performance. Multiple physical functions are also available enabling the ports to be partitioned when connected to 802.1Q trunked switch ports with a logical interface per VLAN being presented to the operating system.
Ports on the same adapter or across multiple adapters may be bonded for redundant operation. This redundancy support also extends to Onload™ with accelerated sockets capable of running across both Active-Passive and Active-Active LACP-enabled links. The SFN8542-PLUS provides the following licensed features enabled:
Ultra-Low Latency
The Flareon Ultra SFN8542 offers fast and efficient hardware that optimizes packet flow to and from the user application. The SFN8542-PLUS unlocks unrivaled sub-microsecond latency both at Layer 2 and TCP and UDP via Onload.
Onload
Onload is Solarflare's industry's leading fully RFC-compliant kernel-bypass user- space TCP/IP stack. Unrivaled application-to-application TCP and UDP latency is available with no modification to the applications being accelerated. Applications may communicate via Onload to any other RFC-compliant TCP/IP stack with seamless interoperability.
Precision Time
The SFN8542 is equipped with a Stratum 3 oscillator providing class-leading clock stability. The SFN8542-PLUS enables the use of sfptpd, Solarflare's time synchronization daemon, which leverages the adapter's ability to apply hardware time-stamps to incoming and outgoing Ethernet frames to synchronize its oscillator either via the PTPv2 protocol or a combination of PPS and NTP. Sfptpd also enables the Linux real-time clock to be synchronized to the external timing reference via the adapter clock. Any time-stamps obtained from either packet events or via the Linux time API may now be correlated directly with the external timing source. These features allow users to implement event traceability that exceeds the MIFID II requirements.
