The PLUS variant of the Flareon Ultra SFN8522 Dual-Port 10GbE SFP+ 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 SFN8522-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 SFN8522-PLUS the ultra-low-latency Ethernet adapter of choice to deploy as a key component throughout Financial Trading infrastructures where two ports of 10GbE  
are required.

CPU-Effecient Networking  
The Flareon Ultra SFN8522-PLUS dual-port 10GbE Ethernet SFP+ server adapter delivers faster, more effecient processing of network traffic to accelerate a wide range of applications. The SFN8522-PLUS has 8 lanes of PCIe 3.1 minimizing latency and maximizing bus throughput between the adapter and the host.

Flexibility in Operation  

In a virtualized environment the adapter supports hypervisor bypass via SR-IOV providing virtualized guests with near bare-metal 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 for redundant 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 SFN8522-PLUS enables the following licensed features enabled:

Ultra-Low Latency

The Flareon Ultra SFN8522-PLUS offers fast and effecient hardware that optimizes packet how to and from the user application. The SFN8522-PLUS unlocks unrivaled sub-microsecond latency both at Layer 2 and TCP and UDP via Onload.

Onload

Onload is Solarfare’s industry’s leading fully RFC-compliant kernel-bypass user-space TCP/ IP stack. Unrivaled application-to-application TCP and UDP latency is available with no modifcation to the applications being accelerated. Applications may communicate via Onload to any other RFC-compliant TCP/IP stack with seamless interoperability.

Precision Time

The SFN8522 is equipped with a Stratum 3 oscillator providing class-leading clock stability. The SFN8522-PLUS enables the use of sfptpd, Solarfare’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 a combination of PPS and  
NTP. Sfptpd also enables the Linux real-time clock to be synchronized to the external timing reference via the adapter clock. Any time-stamps obtained from either packet events or via the Linux time API may now be correlated directly with the external timing source. These features allow users to  
implement event traceability that exceeds  
the MIFID II requirements.