Field trial with Intel 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters for PC

Intel PRO/10GbE LR adapter is the first commercially available 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter for PC. In this report we describe our observations about the adapter functionality and performance, with respect to the possibility of the use for 10 Gigabit end-to-end communication over a wide-area network. 1 Obtaining adapters Intel PRO/10GbE LR is the first commercially available 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter for PC. It was announced by Intel in 2002, but it took about a year until the adapter moved from strictly limited sampling for carefully selected customers to almost normally available commercial product. Still, we had to sign NDA with Intel not to disclose any confidential information to be allowed to buy two of these adapters. Everything in this report is based on our own independent observations and publicly available information and is in compliance with NDA. 2 Installation and test setup The test setup is shown in Fig. 1. Each adapter was installed in a PCI-X 64-bit 133 MHz slot of a Dell 2650 server. This slot has its own PCI bus, that is no other device shared the same PCI bus. The server was equipped with one Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz processor and 1 GB RAM. The two adapters were connected back-to-back with a short optical patch cable. Both machines ran Debian Linux with 2.4.22 kernel. Intel provides driver for Linux including source code on its web server [1]. Binary drivers for Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 are also available. Driver installation was smooth and without any problems. Intel instructs that if there is a PRO/1000 family adapter installed in the same machine with a PRO/10GbE LR adapter, both drivers must be from the same “set”. We had three PRO/1000 family adapters installed in the same machine. We used the latest drivers for PRO/1000 family adapters also available from the Intel web server and all adapters worked without problems.