PRODUCT BRIEFFlareon® Ultra SFN8542-Plus
Dual-Port 40GbE QSFP+ Server Adapter

The PLUS variant of the Flareon® Ultra SFN8542 dual-port 40GbE QSFP+ server I/O adapter adds a suite of enabled
software capabilities that provide out-of-the box support for ultra-low-latency Onload®-accelerated sockets as well as PPS
and PTP time synchronization support.
The SFN8542-PLUS is capable of associating a hardware time-stamp with every incoming and outgoing Ethernet frame
for application troubleshooting or performance monitoring. These features make the SFN8542-PLUS the ultra-low-latency
Ethernet adapter of choice to deploy as a key component throughout Financial Trading infrastructures where either one
or two ports of 40GbE or four ports of 10GbE are required.
CPU-Efficient Networking
The Flareon Ultra SFN8542-PLUS dual-port 40G Ethernet QSFP+ server adapter delivers faster, more efficient processing ofnetwork traffic to accelerate a wide range of applications. The SFN8542-PLUS has 16 lanes of PCIe 3.1 minimizing latency
and maximizing bus throughput between the adapter and the host. The SFN8542-PLUS can also be configured as a quadport 10GbE adapter with one QSFP+ port operating as four 10GbE ports.
Flexibility in Operation
Configured either in 40GbE or 10GbE mode, in a virtualized environment the adapter supports hypervisor bypass via SRIOV providing virtualized guests with near baremetal network performance. Multiple physical functions are also available
enabling the ports to be partitioned when connected to 802.1Q trunked switch ports with a logical interface per VLAN
being presented to the operating system. Ports on the same adapter or across multiple adapters may be bonded forredundant operation. This redundancy support also extends to Onload® with accelerated sockets capable of running
across both active-passive and active-active LACP-enabled links.
The SFN8542-PLUS provides the following licensed features enabled:
Ultra-Low Latency
The Flareon Ultra SFN8542 offers fast and efficient hardware that optimizes packet flow to and from the user application.
The SFN8542-PLUS unlocks unrivaled sub-microsecond latency both at Layer 2 and TCP and UDP via Onload.
OnloadOnload is Solarflare’s industry’s leading fully RFC-compliant kernel-bypass user-space TCP/IP stack. Unrivaled applicationto-application TCP and UDP latency is available with no modification to the applications being accelerated. Applications
may communicate via Onload to any other RFC-compliant TCP/IP stack with seamless interoperability.
Precision Time
The SFN8542 is equipped with a Stratum 3 oscillator providing class-leading clock stability. The SFN8542-PLUS enables
the use of sfptpd, Solarflare’s time synchronization daemon, which leverages the adapter’s ability to apply hardware
time-stamps to incoming and outgoing Ethernet frames to synchronize its oscillator either via the PTPv2 protocol or acombination of PPS and NTP. Sfptpd also enables the Linux real-time clock to be synchronized to the external timingreference via the adapter clock. Any time-stamps obtained from either packet events or via the Linux time API may now becorrelated directly with the external timing source. These features allow users to implement event traceability that exceeds
the MIFID II requirements.

PRODUCT BRIEF

Advanced Features
and Benefits
Stable Precision Oscillator• Stratum 3 compliant

I/O Virtualization• 2048 guest OS protected vNICs; SRIOV; 240 virtual functions; 16physical 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

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

Specifications
Standards & Compliance• IEEE802.3-2012 Ethernet base standard, including 802.3bx,802.3bd, 802.3x• 802.3ba (40G/s), 802.3ae (10 Gigabit Ethernet over 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• PCB dimensions (PCIe half-length low profile)- L: 16.75 cm (6.6 in)- W: 6.89 cm (2.7 in)• Overall dimensions with full-height bracket:- L: 18.1 cm (7.13 in)- W: 12.1 cm (4.76 in)• Overall dimensions with low profile bracket:- L: 18.1 cm (7.13 in)- W: 8.0 cm (3.15 in)Ordering Information• SFN8542-PLUS

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-Plus Product Brief 072919

Flareon and Onload are trademarks of Solarflare Communications, Inc. Other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
Copyright © 2016 Solarflare Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.