GIGABYTE CLN4C44 (rev. 1.0)

GIGABYTE 25GbE SFP28 LAN Add On Card

GIGABYTE’s CLN4C44 quad-port LAN add on card features dual Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx EN network controllers, providing 25Gb/s Ethernet connectivity to address virtualized infrastructure challenges for today’s demanding markets and applications. Providing true hardware-based I/O isolation with unmatched scalability and efficiency, the ConnectX-4 Lx controller provides a cost-effective and flexible Ethernet adapter solution for hyperscale, cloud infrastructures, enterprise datacenters and more, delivering best- in-class performance with smart offloading.

Overlay Networks Support (VXLAN / NVGRE / GENEVE)

In order to better scale their networks, data center operators often create overlay networks that carry traffic from individual virtual machines over logical tunnels in encapsulated formats such as NVGRE and VXLAN. While this solves network scalability issues, it hides the TCP packet from the hardware offloading engines, placing higher loads on the host CPU. The ConnectX-4 Lx EN controllers on GIGABYTE’s CLN4C44 effectively address this by providing advanced NVGRE, VXLAN and GENEVE hardware offloading engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay protocol headers, enabling the traditional offloads to be performed on the encapsulated traffic for these and other tunneling protocols (MPLS, QinQ, and so on). With ConnectX-4 Lx EN, data center operators can achieve native performance in the new network architecture.

RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) Support

GIGABYTE’s CLN4C44 features native hardware support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), a network protocol that allows remote direct memory access (RDMA) over an Ethernet network. Leveraging data center bridging (DCB) capabilities as well as ConnectX-4 Lx EN advanced congestion control hardware mechanisms, RoCE provides efficient low-latency RDMA services over Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks.

Hardware-Based I/O Virtualization Support

SR-IOV technology featured on GIGABYTE’s CLN4C44 provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VMs) within the server. I/O virtualization gives data center administrators better server utilization while reducing cost, power, and cable complexity, allowing more virtual machines and more tenants on the same hardware.

• SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization)
  • Up to 64 Virtual Functions
  • Up to 16 Virtual Functions per port
• Address translation and protection
• Multiple queues per virtual machine
• Virtualization hierarchies (e.g. NPAR)
  • Virtualizing Physical Functions on a physical port
  • SR-IOV on every Physical Function
• Enhanced QoS for vNICs
  • 1K ingress and egress QoS levels
  • Guaranteed QoS for VMs
• Vmware NetQueue support

Mellanox PeerDirect™ Acceleration

Mellanox PeerDirect™ communication acceleration provides high efficiency RDMA access by eliminating unnecessary internal data copies between components on the PCIe bus (for example, from GPU to CPU), and therefore significantly reduces application run time. ConnectX-4 Lx EN advanced acceleration technology enables higher cluster efficiency and scalability to tens of thousands of nodes.

Distributed RAID Support

ConnectX-4 Lx EN delivers advanced Erasure Coding offloading capability, enabling distributed Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), a data storage technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit for the purposes of data redundancy and performance improvement. ConnectX-4 Lx EN’s Reed-Solomon capability introduces redundant block calculations, which, together with RDMA, achieves high performance and reliable storage access.

PXE Support

GIGABYTE’s CLN4C44 is PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment) capable, allowing the host client to boot a software assembly retrieved from a network via industry-standard network protocols such as DHCP and TFTP

Review of GIGABYTE CLN4C44 (rev. 1.0)

​The GIGABYTE CLN4C44 (rev. 1.0) is a discontinued network interface card (NIC) designed to enhance server networking capabilities. It features four SFP28 LAN ports, each supporting data transfer rates of 25Gb/s or 10Gb/s. The card utilizes two Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx controllers and connects via a PCIe x16 interface (Gen3 x8+x8 bus). Its MD2 low-profile form factor measures 68.9 x 160 mm. The package includes both full-height and low-profile brackets to accommodate various server configurations.  

It's important to note that the CLN4C44 was specifically designed for use with GIGABYTE's Purley generation server boards and systems. For optimal performance, GIGABYTE recommends installing this NIC on the CRS1015 riser card within R181 series server systems. ​

As the CLN4C44 is discontinued, availability may be limited. For those seeking similar networking capabilities, exploring GIGABYTE's current lineup of network interface cards or consulting with authorized GIGABYTE distributors is advisable.