perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Sam Russell <>]

We have a bunch of the Intel X520 cards deployed on our perfSONAR nodes, but we'd be very interested in something that offers the same features at a lower cost. Have you done much with jumbo (9000) frames, or any of the lower-level tuning (using ethtool for coalescence, toggling pause frames etc) on the solarflares? Is there anything missing from them compared to the intels X520? Are there features the solarflare offers that the intel doesn't? (light level monitoring, for example)

Cheers

Sam

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 2:29 AM, Kathy Benninger <> wrote:

Garhan,

Thanks for the feedback!  I haven't heard much about the Solarflare cards. I also saw a recent price comparison that listed the Solarflare card as less expensive than the Myricom and Intel X520 cards so I thought it worth investigating.

Kathy

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Kathy Benninger
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

On 9/19/14, 4:04 PM, Garhan Attebury wrote:

We have upwards of 56 of the single port version of that card in production at HCC right now (SFN5152F). One of our perfsonar instances (hcc-ps02.unl.edu) uses one of these cards just to tie it in with perfsonar.

Cost seems to be amongst the lowest, and their linux utilities (for RHEL at least) have been just fine for updating the firmwares and toggling PXE on (off by default).

Zero complaints and zero problems so far, other than they ship with full height brackets by default and I just got done having to swap to the included half-height as we added them to 48x Dell R720xd servers … my fingers did survive though :)


Garhan Attebury
Holland Computing Center
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
402-472-7761


On Sep 19, 2014, at 2:54 PM, Kathy Benninger <> wrote:

Does anyone have experience with Solarflare 10GbE adapters?

The model I'm considering is SFN5162F.

Thanks!
Kathy

--
Sam Russell

Network Engineer
Research & Education Advanced Network NZ Ltd
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