Lenovo CN4054S 10Gb VFA5.2 Adapters

The Flex System CN4052S 2-port 10Gb Virtual Fabric Adapters are part of the VFA5.2 family of System x and Flex System adapters.

• Multiprotocol support for 10 GbE

  The adapters offer two (CN4052S) or four (CN4054S) 10 GbE connections and are cost- and performance-optimized for integrated and converged infrastructures. They offer a “triple play” of converged data, storage, and low latency RDMA networking on a common Ethernet fabric. The adapters provides customers with a flexible storage protocol option for running heterogeneous workloads on their increasingly converged infrastructures.

• Virtual NIC emulation

  The Emulex VFA5.2 family supports three NIC virtualization modes as standard: Virtual Fabric mode (vNIC1), switch independent mode (vNIC2), and Unified Fabric Port (UFP). With NIC virtualization, each of the physical ports on the adapter can be logically configured to emulate up to four or eight virtual NIC (vNIC) functions with user-definable bandwidth settings. With UFP or vNIC2, the CN4052S supports eight vNICs per port. Both adapters support four vNICs per port with vNIC1 and vNIC2. Additionally, each physical port can simultaneously support a storage protocol (FCoE or iSCSI).

• Full hardware storage offloads

  These adapters support an FCoE hardware offload engine, which is either standard with the adapter or optionally enabled via Lenovo Features on Demand (FoD), depending on the adapter selected. The offload engine accelerates storage protocol processing and delivers up to 1.5 million I/O operations per second (IOPS). This enables the server’s processing resources to focus on applications and improves the server’s overall performance.

• Lenovo Features on Demand (FoD)

  Adapters 00AG540 and 00AG590 use FoD software activation technology to enable additional features. FoD enables the adapters to be initially deployed as low-cost Ethernet NICs, and later upgraded in the field to support FCoE or iSCSI hardware offload. Adapters 00AG540 and 00AG590 use FoD to enable FCoE and iSCSI, whereas adapters 01CV780 and 01CV790 already have these features enabled and do not use Features on Demand.

• Emulex Virtual Network Acceleration (VNeX) technology support

  Emulex VNeX supports Microsoft network virtualization by using generic routing encapsulation (NVGRE) and VMware-supported virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN). These technologies create more logical LANs for traffic isolation that are needed by cloud architectures. Because these protocols increase the processing burden on the server’s processor, the adapters have an offload engine that is designed specifically for processing these tags. The resulting benefit is that cloud providers can use the benefits of VxLAN/NVGRE with no reduction in the server’s performance.

• PCIe Express 3.0 x8 host interface
• vNIC (NIC partition) capability
• MSI-X support
• Fabric Manager support
• Lenovo XClarity Administrator support
• Power consumption: 25 W maximum

Part Code:

CN4054S