Solarflare SFN5322F Dual-Port 10GbE SFP+ Onload Precision Time Synchronization Server Adapter

The SFN5322F accelerates time synchronization by performing high-precision hardware time stamping of IEEE 1588 Ethernet frames together with high-performance, ultra-low latency application acceleration.

The SFN5322F eliminates a secondary server adapter (freeing PCIe slots) and dedicated appliances, as well as additional physical networks, which would otherwise be required for clock distribution, while facilitating slave servers to precisely synchronize internal clocks to a network master clock. Combining ultra-low latency data transfers with clock synchronization on a single network simplifies latency-sensitive applications where clock synchronization is critical, such as financial services and distributed processing environments.

The SFN5322F driver is compatible with the SFN5122F product and seamlessly interfaces to host software time synchronization solutions that utilize the standard Linux socket option SO_TIMESTAMPING, such as PTPv1 or PTPv2 daemons, which implement the IEEE 1588 time synchronization protocols. Driver interfaces to kernels that predate SO_TIMESTAMPING are also available.

Application Performance Leadership

SFN5322F delivers the industry’s lowest latency at the highest message rates to customers with leading edge enterprise data center deployments. SFN5322F also delivers the industry’s highest message rate and lowest latency jitter, with full 40 Gbps bidirectional line-rate performance. Featuring a rich set of stateless offloads, it provides efficient acceleration of the most demanding network protocol tasks.

SFN5322F supports Solarflare’s OpenOnload® application accelerator, a full-featured, highperformance user-level network stack for Linux. OpenOnload provides unprecedented performance with application compatibility and protocol compliance, bypassing kernel and networking overheads, while featuring binary compatibility with standard APIs and applications

Lowest Power

At 2.6 watts per port, the SFN5322F enables a uniquely low power budget increasing the efficiency of combining ultra-low latency 10G Ethernet with the additional precision time stamping capabilities.

SFN5322F High-Precision Time Synchronization

Solarflare’s SFN5322F utilizes a high-precision clock source, which meets the rigorous requirements for use in a Stratum 3 clock system for network synchronization. SFN5322F’s high-precision clock stability enables servers to synchronize to a data network clock with greater precision, and serve as a highly stable and precise clock source. Alternative products utilizing crystals can drift significantly over time, temperature, and age, resulting in an inferior clock synchronization solution. For example, between synchronization cycles a typical 15 PPM crystal can drift 4000% more than the SFN5322’s 0.37 PPM Stratum 3 clock source, significantly impacting time stamp precision. Consequently, in PTP applications the SFN5322F limits drift and increases precision, which are key factors for high-precision PTP clock synchronization.