Demartek Evaluation of Broadcom BCM957810 10Gb FCoE/iSCSI and IP Networking Adapter
1 June 2012
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.
IT administrators are also turning to 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) technologies for cost-effective and flexible methods of addressing growing network traffic demands. A key component of the 10GbE network is the network adapter with network protocol processing offload capabilities for greater host processor utilization. 10GbE networking adapters by Broadcom allow servers to fully leverage the available 10GbE bandwidth, while reducing processor utilization. As a result, 10GbE end-to-end performance is comparable to more specialized and costlier cloud based data center server to fabric interconnects. With 10GbE, organizations can expand application capabilities, increase scalability and improve responsiveness to address dynamic business environments.
Broadcom has introduced its BCM957810S dual-port Converged NIC that supports 10 Gbps IP networking with network protocol offload capabilities, 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 10 Gbps adapters.
Storage Offload Performance
We found that the Broadcom BCM957810S adapter outperformed the competitive adapters. We were able
to achieve approximately 2.5 million IOPS for FCoE random reads and more than 1.5 million IOPS for
iSCSI random reads using the Broadcom BCM957810S adapter. Broadcom has demonstrated very strong
performance and good CPU efficiency when compared to both full-hardware-offload adapters and
non-hardware-offload adapters.
IP Networking Performance
We found that the Broadcom BCM957810S 10GbE adapter outperformed the equivalent competitive adapters
in our tests, for the transmit and receive tests as well as the small packet tests.
More information
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Demartek Evaluation of Broadcom BCM957810 10GbE Adapter |