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 (PDF, 557 KB) 
Demartek Evaluation of Broadcom BCM957712-S 10GbE FCoE/iSCSI Offload Adapter |