Date: 26-Nov-2009 URL: www.sun.com/products/networking/ethernet/10gigabitethernet/features.xml

Sun 10 Gigabit Ethernet PCI-X Adapter

Features and Benefits

The Sun 10 Gigabit Ethernet PCI-X Adapter (X5544A-4) can give you significant improvements in bandwidth performance and lowered latency, reducing bottlenecks to network attached storage (NAS) devices. It can even reduce cabling expenses by cutting the number of links required to reach your desired bandwidth.

Key Benefits

Faster throughput with 10 GbE link
More computations to be handled by the CPU

Features

Enterprise-class performance

It may seem obvious, but 10 Gigabit Ethernet speeds can give you an immediate 10x boost in data transfers over your current Gigabit Ethernet cards. Your high-speed LANs can run at top speed, avoiding typical bottlenecks and slow performance.

Higher availability

Sun 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters offer redundancy and failover support, 802.1Q VLAN sup- port, and support for Dynamic Reconfiguration for your mission-critical applications.

Dynamic Reconfiguration for Sun Fire Midrange Servers

Dynamic Reconfiguration and Dynamic System Domains

Easy compatibility

They include support for PCI-X and PCI standards, low- and standard-profile configurations, IPv4, IPv6, and IPMP standards to solve a wide range of high-bandwidth networking needs.

Sun Trunking moves data even faster

Sun 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters give you the advantage of Sun Trunking support. Sun Trunking software is designed to aggregate Sun Ethernet adapter card ports into a single virtual link or trunk. The resulting aggregated "fat pipe" instantly increases your bandwidth and availability for higher data transfer rates.

Jumbo Frames: take the load off your CPUs

Sun Ethernet adapters feature Jumbo Frames support, allowing them to accommodate larger packets (up to 9Kbyte), which helps your CPUs handle more computations. At the same time, their hardware assist for TCP checksum generation and checking, packet parsing, and interrupt coalescing reduce CPU processing overhead.

Full duplex speeds

With full duplex capabilities, these adapters give you near line-rate data transfers in both directions, increasing throughput.

IEEE compliance you'd expect

Broad compliance gives you more flexibility and a long life. These adapters are fully compliant with IEEE 802.3ab/802.3z standards as well as IEEE 802.1Q VLAN (on Solaris 8 OS or later), and 802.1P/802.1D Priority Tagging and Quality of Service.

Secure through standards

Support for industry standard VLANs helps enhance network security by controlling access to specified portions of the network. A VLAN is a collection of network nodes that share the same broadcast domain regardless of their physical location or connection point in the network. Each VLAN serves as a logical workgroup with no physical barriers making it possible for users to share information and resources as though located on the same LAN. VLANs also allow a single physical LAN to be divided into multiple logical LANS.