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Demartek Evaluation of Broadcom BCM957712-S 10Gb Ethernet/FCoE/iSCSI Offload Adapter

11 July 2011

Enterprises are moving towards 10 gigabit networking infrastructures and are examining the uses for multi­protocol adapters, especially as server virtualization continues to be deployed. With an increasing number of operating systems and/or applications installed in today’s servers, the need for network and storage adapt­ers that can support multiple protocols becomes more important.

Broadcom has introduced its BCM957712-S dual-port Converged NIC that supports 10Gb Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) with full hardware offload and iSCSI with full hardware offload. This adapter fits the description of a Converged Network Adapter (CNA). Broadcom commissioned Demartek to eval­u­ate this adapter and compare its performance to other competitive 10Gb adapters.

We found that the Broadcom BCM957712-S adapter outperformed the competitive adapters. We were able to achieve approximately 1.7 million IOPS for FCoE random reads and more than 1 million IOPS for iSCSI ran­dom reads using the Broadcom BCM957712-S adapter. Broadcom has demonstrated very strong per­for­mance and good CPU efficiency when compared to both full-hardware-offload adapters and non-hardware-offload adapters.

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View the Demartek Evaluation of Broadcom BCM957712-S 10Gb Ethernet/FCoE/iSCSI Offload Adapter
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Demartek Evaluation of Broadcom BCM957712-S 10GbE FCoE/iSCSI Offload Adapter