The manufacturer QNAP has presented its fastest network card, the new model is the QNAP QXG-100G2SF-CX6 and is compatible with both its high-performance NAS servers, as well as PCs, with the aim of having a network at a speed of 100Gbps. This new model is aimed at medium and large companies where we have a really powerful NAS, and we are able to squeeze these high speeds. Next, we are going to explain the main characteristics of this new card and the speeds that we can achieve.
Main features
This new network card has two ports at a speed of 100Gbpsthe ports are of type QSFP28 as usual for these speeds. Thanks to the incorporation of 2 QSFP28 ports, we will be able to reach combined speeds of up to 200Gbps, ideal for making the most of the potential of all-flash type NAS servers, that is, with all SSD storage units. The driver for this network card is the NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx, and it allows us to synchronize at speeds of 1/10/25/40/50/100Gbps.
Other very important features of this new model are:
- SR-IOV support
- Support for hardware crypto acceleration.
- Support for RoCE and ZTR.
- VLAN support
- iSER, NVGRE, VXLAN and Geneve support.
This network card, due to the high bandwidth it needs, has one PCIe 4.0 x16 connector, therefore, our NAS server must have this type of port, otherwise we will not be able to make the most of these two ports that we have available. In addition, thanks to the controller this card is also compatible with PCIe 3.0 x16, although logically the maximum bandwidth will be limited by the speed of the computer’s PCIe bus.
Along with the network card, we have a pre-installed low-profile bracket, we also have a full format and a specific one for QNAP NAS servers. In this way, this card will be really versatile, since we can install it both in NAS servers from the manufacturer as well as in PCs of different formats. If you are going to install it on a Windows computer, you should know that it is necessary to install an NVIDIA driver for it to work, and the same happens if you use a Linux-based operating system. In the case of installing it on a QNAP NAS, we already have the driver pre-installed, so there is no need to do anything else.
Uses that we can give to this card
This network card is aimed at a very advanced use, the first thing we must bear in mind is that we will only get the most out of it if we install it in an all-flash NAS server, that is, that has all its SSD storage, we will also need a really powerful processor to be able to manage all the traffic without bottlenecks. For all these reasons, this network card is aimed at professionals in the audiovisual industry, where they need a large bandwidth to be able to work properly.
In the case of installing it on a PC with Windows or Linux, you must take into account that your motherboard has a PCIe 4.0 x16 port available, generally high-end motherboards have two ports of this type, to connect two graphics cards and that work simultaneously. Of course, we will only be able to squeeze its performance if we use NVMe SSD storage in this equipment, because with the SATA3 interface we will have a great limitation.
Finally, for network and system enthusiasts, thanks to this network card we can manage all the traffic of operating system virtualization, since it incorporates technologies specifically oriented to this.
