IBM #EC3B PCIe3 2-Port 40 GbE NIC RoCE QSFP+ Adapter (also #EC3A) for IBM Power Systems

IBM feature #EC3B is the PCIe3 2-Port 40 GbE NIC RoCE QSFP+ Adapter, CCIN 57BD, for IBM Power Systems. It is a regular-height PCI Express generation 3 dual-port 40-Gigabit Ethernet adapter with a PCIe 3.0 host bus interface. The adapter acts as a network interface controller (NIC) and uses the IBTA RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) protocols for Remote Direct Memory Access services, which offloads networking work from the processor. Feature #EC3A, the PCIe3 LP 2-Port 40 GbE NIC RoCE QSFP+ Adapter, is the low-profile version with the same CCIN and the same FRU.

The two 40 Gb quad (4-channel) small form-factor pluggable (QSFP+) ports each run at a nominal 40 Gbps. No transceivers are included. The adapter offers link aggregation and failover, dedicated adapter resources and protection for virtual machines, data center bridging support, FC-BB-5 FCoE, TCP/IP stateless offload in hardware, traffic steering across multiple cores, intelligent interrupt coalescence and Quality of Service. NIC support covers standard frames of 1518 bytes plus 4 bytes for the VLAN tag, jumbo frames of 9018 bytes plus 4, IPv4 or IPv6 TCP checksum offload, IPv4 transmit large send, IPv4 receive large receive and Enhanced Error Handling from PCI bus errors. NIC and RoCE device drivers can run at the same time on one physical port.

The adapter FRU number is 00FW105. Power is 3.3 V on a PCIe3 x8 bus, in a short form factor. Short runs use compatible QSFP+ 40 Gbps active copper twinaxial Ethernet cables: #EB2B (1 m, part 49Y7934), #EB2H (3 m, 49Y7935) and #ECBN (5 m, 00D5809). Beyond 5 m, a pair of QSFP+ 40G BASE-SR transceivers (#EB27, part 49Y7928) attach to optical cables #EB2J (10 m, 41V2458) or #EB2K (30 m, 45D6369), and copper and optical cables are not mixed on one adapter.