PRODUCT BRIEF

XtremeScale™ SFN8542
Dual-Port 40GbE QSFP+ PCIe Server Adapter

The new XtremeScale™ SFN8000 adapter family provides Solarflare’s best performance yet, with higher bandwidth, lower
latency and higher packet rate. The SFN8000 family adapters are based on a common hardware platform, enablingcustomers to configure the features and performance they want to meet the particular needs of each application.
Capabilities such as ultra-low latency, Onload® kernel bypass, class leading clock synchronization accuracy providing MIFID
II readiness, ServerLock® Filter Engine, SolarCapture® Pro and more can be enabled to run on any SFN8000 adapter on
the network, making this the one Ethernet adapter to deploy across your data center or cloud infrastructure.
CPU-Efficient Networking
The XtremeScale SFN8542 dual-port 40G Ethernet QSFP+ server adapter delivers faster, more efficient processing ofnetwork traffic to accelerate a wide range of applications. The SFN8542 has 16 lanes of PCIe 3.1 making it an ideal workhorsefor 40GbE data center and cloud workloads, providing high-bandwidth, high packet rate and CPU-efficient processing ofnetwork traffic. The SFN8542 can be configured as a dual-port 40GbE or a quad-port 10GbE adapter as one QSFP+ port canalso operate as four 10GbE SFP+ ports.
Configurable Software
When configured with Solarflare software licenses, the SFN8542 can address ultra-low latency applications, highly accurate
clock synchronization and hardware time stamping, packet filtering, packet capture and more. Adapters can be purchased
pre-configured with popular software bundles, or configured on-site with software options.
Ultra-Low Latency
The platform’s hardware optimizes packet flow to and from the user application. When licensed for ultra-low latency,
it delivers unrivaled sub-microsecond TCP and UDP latency. With Onload, the industry’s best application-to-application
performance is enabled via Solarflare’s unique and patented kernel bypass techniques.
Accelerating Applications
The SFN8542 is ideal for scale-out cloud, web and CDN application environments. Solarflare adapters are used
in a wide range of use cases, including Software-defined networking (SDN), Network functions virtualization(NFV), web content optimization, DNS acceleration, web firewalls, load balancing, NOSQL databases, caching tiers(Memcached), web proxies, video streaming and storage networks. The SFN8542 also provides the ideal link between fast
NVMe storage and the network. In addition when used with Onload, the SFN8542 further reduces host processing overhead
and accelerates web and cloud traffic. When used with ServerLock Filter Engine, the SFN8542 provides an additional layerof defense against DDoS attacks at the network ingress point to the server. Attacks can be absorbed without degradation of“good” traffic, enabling a 3 to 4x improvement in packet-level filtering server headroom.*
Scalable, High-Performance Virtualization
Solarflare is the proven leader in VM density and performance, and the SFN8542 raises the bar with 2048 vNICs, SR-IOV,
overlay network acceleration e.g. VXLAN, NVGRE. In addition, the SFN8542 supports kernel bypass running in a guest VM,
so users can run ultra-low latency Onload or SolarCapture Pro in a virtualized or cloud environment.
The SFN8542 is also fully flow-aware, providing flexible layer 2-4 flow processing and flow steering natively. The benefits
are efficient flow acceleration in almost every environment from the data center to the stock exchange.

PRODUCT BRIEF

Advanced Featuresand Benefits
Stable Precision Oscillator• Stratum 3 compliant

I/O Virtualization• 2048 guest OS protected vNICs; SR-IOV; 240 virtual functions; 16
physical functions; 16 NIC partitions

PCI Express• PCIe 3.1 x16 @ 8.0 GT/s
• SFC9240 10G/40G Ethernet controller• Supports high-performance• 10GbE/40GbE

QSFP+ Support• Supports optical QSFP+ modules including Solarflare SFM40G-SR4,
Direct-Attach Copper, Active Optical Cables, QSFP+ to SFP+ copper
DAC cables

Low Latency• Cut-through architecture/intelligent interrupt coalescing

Packet Rate

• 60Mpps TX & RX sustained line rate with all packet sizes

Receive Side Scaling (RSS)• Distributes IPv4, IPv6 loads across all CPU cores; MSI-X minimizes
interrupt overhead

Hardware Offloads• TSO, LRO, GSO, IPv4/IPv6 and TCP/UDP checksums

Specifications
Standards & Compliance• IEEE802.3-2012 Ethernet base standard, including 802.3bx,802.3bd, 802.3x 802.3ba (40G/s), 802.3ae (10 Gigabit Ethernetover fiber)• 802.3z (1000BASE-X Gbit/s Ethernet over fiberoptic at 1Gbit/s (125MB/s)• 1000BASE-X• 10GBASE-CR -SR -LR• 40GBASE-CR4 -SR4 -LR4
• Dual QSFP+ (SFF-8683) connectors• RoHS compliant

Power• 10W (typical)

Operating Range• 0º to 50º C• 300 LFM, min.

Physical Dimensions• L: 16.75 cm (6.6 in)• W: 6.9 cm (2.7 in)• End bracket height:- PCI Express standard: 12.0 cm (4.725 in)- PCI Express low-profile: 7.92 cm (3.12 in)Ordering Information• SFN8542• SFN8542-G (TAA-Compliant)

IP Flow Filtering• Hardware directs packets based on IP, TCP, UDP headers

Advanced Packet Filtering• 4096 multicast filters; 4096 VLANs/port; adaptive TCP/UDP/IP,MAC, VLAN, RSS, RFS filtering; accelerated RFS

Remote Boot• PXE; unattended installation; UEFI; Solarflare secure bootManagement• SNMP, ACPI v3.0

Overlay Network Acceleration• VXLAN, NVGRE, GENEVE

Switching Support• Integrated Layer 2 Ethernet switch, VEB/Virtual switch

Virtualization Support• VMware ESXi 5.x,6.0; Microsoft Hyper-V; Linux KVM

Operating Systems• RHEL 6, 7, MRG; SLES 11, 12, SLERT; Debian 7.x, 8.x; Ubuntu 14.04
LTS, 14.10, 15.04; other Linux; Windows Server• 2008 Regulatory product code: S7120 R2, 2012, 2012 R2

For more information please visit: solarflare.com
Contact Us: US +1 949 581 6830 | UK +44 (0) 1223 477171

HK +852 2624 8868 | Email: sales@solarflare.com

SF-116285-CD Issue 3
SFN8542 Product Brief 072819

Onload, ServerLock, SolarCapture, and XtremeScale are trademarks of Solarflare Communications, Inc. Other trademarks are property of theirrespective owners. Copyright © 2016 Solarflare Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.