background image

10 Gigabit Performance  
for Top-of-Rack Connections

The Intel® 10 Gigabit AF DA Dual Port Server Adapter is the 
newest member of Intel’s robust family of 10 Gigabit products. 
Designed as a low-cost, low-power adapter, the Intel 10 Gigabit 
AF DA Dual Port Server Adapter provides direct attach copper 
twinaxial cable connections between servers and a top-of-rack 
switch. Two ports, coupled with a low-profile PCI Express* form 
factor, make this adapter ideal for slot-constrained environments. 
Using direct attach copper cables compliant with the SFP + MSA 
SFF-8431 specification, the Intel 10 Gigabit AD DA Dual Port 
Server Adapter is well-suited for customers who require low-cost 
“in-the-rack” connections of less than 10 meters between server 
and top-of-rack switch. 

Energy-Efficient, Next-Generation  
10 Gigabit Performance

10 Gigabit Ethernet is rapidly becoming the mainstay for 
backbones within enterprise and service provider networks.  
Intel’s 10GBASE Direct Attach adapter extends the 10 Gigabit 
adoption to the server rack. The escalating deployments of 
servers with multi-core processors and demanding applications 
such as high-performance computing (HPC), database clusters, 
virtualized servers and video on demand are driving the need 
for 10 Gigabit connections in the server rack. Based on the 
82598EB 10 Gigabit Ethernet controller, Intel’s 10 Gigabit AF DA 
Server Adapter is designed to meet the throughput and latency 
requirements of bandwidth-hungry applications, while offering a 
very low-power envelope for energy efficiency. 

Performance-Enhancing Features  
for Multi-Core Environments

As a member of the 10 Gigabit family of products, the 10GbE Direct 
Attach adapter supports all of the features and functionality in 
Intel’s other 82598EB-based adapters. When implemented within 
multi-core processor environments, the Intel 10 Gigabit AF DA 
Server Adapter offers advanced networking features for efficient 

distribution of Ethernet workloads across CPU cores. Load balanc-
ing of interrupts using MSI-X enables more efficient response times 
and application performance. CPU utilization can be lowered further 
through stateless offloads such as TCP segmentation offload, 
header replications/splitting, and Direct Cache Access (DCA).

Intel 10 Gigabit AF DA Server Adapters are optimized for  
virtualized environments, supporting multiple queues, alleviat-
ing I/O bottlenecks between virtual machines. Virtual Machine 
Device queue

1

 (VMDq) technology offloads data sorting and  

data copying from the virtual machine monitor (VMM) software 
layer to the hardware, improving overall throughput and CPU  
utilization on virtualized servers. Additionally, Intel 10 Gigabit AF 
DA Server Adapters enable Intel® I/O Acceleration Technology

2

 

(Intel® I/OAT) with support for Intel® QuickData for faster I/O 
processing on the new Quad-Core and Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® 
processor-based servers. 

Conserve valuable PCI Express (PCIe*) server slots while adding 
10 Gigabit Ethernet capability with Intel 10 Gigabit AF DA  
Server Adapters. The dedicated input/output (I/O) bandwidth 
of PCIe ensures priority performance on each port – without 
bus sharing – for 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, as well as a 
low-profile design, which improves server throughput and rack 
density at the same time. In addition, eight-lane PCIe enables 
maximum bandwidth for fast and efficient data transfer. The  
low-power, efficient design allows for two 10 Gigabit Ethernet 
ports in a single low-profile PCIe adapter.

Product Brief

Intel® 10 Gigabit AF DA Dual Port Server Adapter

Network Connectivity

Intel

®

 10 Gigabit AF DA Dual Port Server Adapter

Reviews: