BackSolarFlare for the Masses:10 GigE Network cards
Hello,
Saar here, resident engineer at Myriad Supply. Today I’ll be talking about 10 GigE network cards from SolarFlare.
If you look at 90% of the current world wide servers, they have a Network card in the back:
This network card will run at a speed of 1000 Mbps = 1GigE, and is bolted and welded to the motherboard:
Today 40% of servers could use or are opting to use network cards that are 10 GigE = 10000 Mbps. Those cards will connect to the PCI-Express Slots.
The cards look like this:
Let’s use Solarflare as an example.
They have Performant adapters- Entry Models:
They have ONLOAD- High Level Models:
And lastly they have Jewel of the Crown- Precision time synced cards:
Logically, if you’re looking at 10 GigE, the Performant are your weapon of choice.
If you’re someone that demands performance, you can leverage the ONLOAD cards. And if you’re a financial trader and are specifically looking to time synchronizing your cards so that you get optimal low latency, you may want to consider Precision time cards.
There is a cost attached to each step of the ladder. Okay, now you might say there is an $800 difference. Why do you need to pay that?
The 7 layers of the OSI model- Each step in the layers requires some CPU cycles and therefore adds some latency:
In the movies when the Pirate captain Jack Sparrow says “Raise the Mizzenmast, turn to port”, his lieutenant {Gibbs} has to repeat his words to make sure he caught them right. So he will also say the same thing, which adds 10 seconds to everything.
TCP / IP is built with a lot of checks and back and forth chatter to make things run OK. So the ONLOAD allows you to shortcut that.
So for example in Top Gun:
When your co-pilot yells “BREAK!!!!!!!” you don’t have to waste 5 seconds repeating “sorry, old boy did you meant Break there?” You simply break.
So the ONLOAD can save you lots of time for each transaction, which for Financial HFT trading is critical. It is also a big saver for other people like oil & gas as they calculate a lot of data for mining/drilling (NASA, Weather guys etc.).
The last card was the Timing. Since my PC says 2:58 and your PC might say 2:59, a difference of 60 seconds. This is useless when you are trying to shave milli-milli-seconds off a transaction. So the cards will constantly try to sync up against a time server {Which we also sell} That is why there is an added cost for the timing part.
The above ONLOAD is included with the ONLOAD cards. However they included it as an OPEN piece of software, which means they give you the software but they only support it by Email.
The above slide was the levels of support you can get. If you get an ENTEPRISE level support agreement, the top R&D research and development along with the SolarFlare support will help you shave off seconds from your lap times.
Now take into account that if you are a financial company with Card issues and your trading is suffering, you may lose money by the bucketful, in which case you may want to consider
The Enterprise support. The Enterprise support is like a J-care/ Smartnet for the software on the cards with a lot of coding support.
The above support covers the Software part and you can purchase a hardware warranty for the card.
Finally, there are other card manufacturers out there.
The Solarflare is the SFN.
Mellanox: We are partners – Their software works in a different fashion than the Solarflare one, but the idea is similar.
Myricom: We are partners too – Their cards are excellent too and follow the same idea. (I’ll review them at a future data)
NetEffect was bought by INTEL, mainly a CPU manufacturer and not a dedicated 10 Gbps card company like SolarFlare.
Regular INTEL cards – These are barely comparable to the PERFORMANT cards from SolarFlare. They do not have the ability to shortcut.
The last item is the type of connection the card can have: 1 port or 2 ports, Copper RJ-45 connectors or SFP+
If you’re interested in SolarFlare or Myricom, check out http://www.myriadsupply.com/.
Saar Harel is a resident Engineer at Myriad Supply, and has been in the Networking Field for over 20 years. You can check out his Google+ and ask him questions!
