Marvell and HPE Introduce Industry Standard Adapters for HPE ProLiant and Apollo Gen10 Plus Servers

Innovation can come in many forms. Sometimes it’s with a completely new technology, sometimes with updating an existing product and in other cases, just by changing the approach to how you acquire and deliver a product. It is the latter that is the latest innovation from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) when it comes to I/O connectivity.

In conjunction with the launch of HPE ProLiant and Apollo Gen10 Plus servers, the HPE Server I/O Options team developed a new approach for sourcing and qualifying Ethernet adapters for these servers. Deploying what they call Industry Standard Adapters, HPE can now better meet the needs of their end customers with an increased number of options when it comes to firmware and driver updates for their Ethernet adapters in HPE servers.

Traditionally, HPE would source I/O technology from OEM suppliers such as Marvell, create customer model numbers and specifications for adapters and make firmware and drives only available from HPE. These “custom” adapters were often referred to as HPE-optimized. Starting with Gen10 Plus servers, HPE is eliminating the customization and using standard adapters that can work not only in HPE servers, but in others as well. Hence the term “Industry Standard Adapters.”

Marvell is glad to be a strategic partner of HPE, providing a wide variety of Marvell® FastLinQ® adapters that are fully qualified and supported by HPE on the HPE ProLiant Gen10 Plus servers. Below are the current offerings from Marvell for HPE Gen10 Plus servers.

With the new approach, HPE Gen10 Plus customers can see the Marvell model numbers in the HPE product description and identify the Marvell vendor and product IDs at server boot. Then they will be directed to Marvell for detailed specifications, user guides, technical briefs and even firmware and/or driver downloads.  The support model will not change and HPE will continue to provide level 1 – 3 support. The new approach will benefit HPE customers in a number of ways:

• Transparency of the specific type of product and model information – eliminates having to use complex decoder aides or other documentation to determine real manufacturer.
• Consistency in product/model naming on Operating System HCLs that saves time cross-checking I/O and operating system compatibility.
• Faster time-to-market for firmware/driver enhancements and updates to get fixes when they are available from the manufacturer.
• Ability to streamline maintenance process across multi-vendor server environments and get firmware/drivers direct from manufacturer websites.

For those HPE ProLiant customers who prefer utilizing HPE-specific deployment software and utilities like HPE System Insight Manager (SIM), System Update Manager (SUM) or Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP), HPE will also make firmware and drivers available through their normal quarterly processes.

The Marvell portfolio for HPE ProLiant Gen10 Plus includes PCIe and OCP 3.0 form factor adapters in 1/10GBASE-T, 10Gb SFP+ and 10/25GbE SFP28 variants. All these adapters support Marvell’s industry-leading list of features and capabilities, including:

• Universal RDMA: allows customers to run RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) or iWARP RDMA concurrently.
• SmartAN™ technology: automatically sets bandwidth and forward error correction settings of the adapter to match the switch it is connected to and the cable type being used.
• Redfish PLDM: provides integrated remote monitoring and management of thermal environment and other adapter data.
• Marvell FastLinQ QCS Management Utility: available as GUI, CLI, VMware plug-in or PowerShell Kit for maximum flexibility.
• DPDK Offload: up to 68Mpps bi-directional small packet acceleration.
• SR-IOV offload for virtual server environments.
• Tunnel Offloads: VXLAN, NVGRE, GENEVE.
• NVMe over fabric: for high performance SDS/HCI or shared storage connectivity.
• IEEE 1588 Energy Efficient Ethernet
• PCIe 3.0 x8 and OCP 3.0 form factors

For more details on Marvell’s FastLinQ adapters, download the family product brief here.

For more information on Universal RDMA, SmartAN technology and other unique Marvell FastLinQ capabilities, visit our Follow the Wire Video library here https://connect.marvell.com/hpe-videos.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 12th, 2019 at 9:31 am and is filed under Company News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.