Lenovo CN4052 10Gb Virtual Fabric Adapters

The Flex System CN4052 2-port 10Gb Virtual Fabric Adapter are part of the VFA5 family of System x and Flex System adapters. These adapter supports up to four virtual NIC (vNIC) devices per port (8 for the CN4052), where each physical 10 GbE port can be divided into four virtual ports with flexible bandwidth allocation.

• Multi-protocol support for 10 GbE

  The adapters offers two (CN4052) or eight (CN4058S) 10 GbE connections and are cost- and performance-optimized for integrated and converged infrastructures. They offer a “triple play” of converged data, storage, and low latency RDMA networking on a common Ethernet fabric. The adapters provides customers with a flexible storage protocol option for running heterogeneous workloads on their increasingly converged infrastructures.

• Virtual NIC emulation

  The Emulex VFA5 family supports three NIC virtualization modes, right out of the box: Virtual Fabric mode (vNIC1), switch independent mode (vNIC2), and Universal Fabric Port (UFP). With NIC virtualization, each of the two physical ports on the adapter can be logically configured to emulate up to four virtual NIC (vNIC) functions with user-definable bandwidth settings. Additionally, each physical port can simultaneously support a storage protocol (FCoE or iSCSI).

• Full hardware storage offloads

  These adapters support an optional FCoE hardware offload engine, which is enabled via Lenovo Features on Demand (FoD). This offload engine accelerates storage protocol processing and delivers up to 1.5 million I/O operations per second (IOPS), which enables the server’s processing resources to focus on applications and improves the server’s performance.

• Power savings

  When compared with previous generation Emulex VFA3 adapters, the Emulex VFA5 adapters can save up to 50 watts per server, reducing energy and cooling OPEX through improved storage offloads.

• Lenovo Features on Demand (FoD)

  The adapters use FoD software activation technology. FoD enables the adapters to be initially deployed as a low-cost Ethernet NICs, and then later upgraded in the field to support FCoE or iSCSI hardware offload.

• Emulex Virtual Network Acceleration (VNeX) technology support

  Emulex VNeX supports Microsoft supported network virtualization by using generic routing encapsulation (NVGRE) and VMware-supported virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN). These technologies create more logical LANs for traffic isolation that are needed by cloud architectures. Because these protocols increase the processing burden on the server’s processor, the adapters have an offload engine that is designed specifically for processing these tags. The resulting benefit is that cloud providers can use the benefits of VxLAN/NVGRE while not being penalized with a reduction in the server’s performance.

• Two-port 10 Gb Ethernet adapter
• Single-ASIC controller using the Emulex XE104 design
• One PCIe Express 3.0 x8 host interface (8 GT/s)
• MSI-X support
• Fabric Manager support
• Power consumption: 25 W maximum

Part Code:

CN4052