Artesyn SharpSwitch PCIE-9205, Additional Information For The Installation And Use

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Chapter 1
SharpSwitch™ PCIE-9205 Installation and Use (6806800U18D)
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Introduction
The Artesyn SharpSwitch™ PCIE-9205 is an intelligent Network Interface Card in PCI Express
card form factor for use in the Artesyn MaxCore™ platform. It acts as Ethernet I/O for one or
many microserver cards with stateless flow balancing to multiple virtual machines (VM) as well
as flow pre- and post-processing. As the SharpSwitch card also features an Intel® Xeon® D
series processor, it can also assume the role the MaxCore system manager.
The dual 100G adapter on the PCIE-9205 card is based on the Intel® Ethernet Multi-host
Controller FM10840 (code name Red Rock Canyon), a combination of an Ethernet switch and
a network adapter. Due to the switch-internals of this silicon, many pre-filtering and
distribution tasks such as load balancing needed for such a system can be offloaded to the
switch silicon before the packet even gets distributed into the low latency PCI Express
infrastructure.
PCI I/O virtualization functions allow for each virtual function (VF) on each of the installed
microserver cards to have direct and sole access to one or multiple virtual Ethernet network
interface controllers. The integrated switch and Ethernet controller allows for hardware based
virtual switching between all VMs inside the MaxCore platform.
1.1 Features
The following are the main features of the PCIE-9205 card:

PCI Express card form factor, single slot

Intel® FM10840 Red Rock Canyon “system on chip” (SOC).
– ~100GE aggregated internal platform bandwidth (PCIe x16
PCIe Gen3)

Built-in switch for
– Cut-through traffic (traffic entering and directly leaving the card)
– Traffic to/from microserver cards

2x QSFP28 connectors capable supporting up to 2x 100G, 8x 25G, 2x 40G, or 8x10G.

Intel® Xeon® D 8-core processor system host capability
– Up to 64GB DDR4
– PCI Express Gen3 x8 connection to RRC switch
– 2x SATA connection to local mass storage