540-BDIN Dell Mellanox ConnectX-5 10/25GbE PCI-E 2 Ports Network Adapter

Product Overview of Dell 540-BDIN 2 Ports Network Adapter

The Dell 540-BDIN, part of the Mellanox ConnectX-5 family of Ethernet adapters, represents a pivotal advancement in high-speed networking technology. Engineered for performance-driven environments, this PCI-Express network adapter is designed to alleviate bottlenecks in server-to-server and server-to-storage communications. By delivering line-rate 10 or 25 Gigabits per second (GbE) per port, it provides the foundational bandwidth necessary for virtualization, cloud infrastructures, software-defined storage, and high-performance computing (HPC) clusters.

Main Specifications

• Manufacturer: Dell
• Part Number: 540-BDIN
• Product Type: 2 Ports Network Adapter

Technical Specifications

• Two 25-Gigabit SFP28 interfaces
• Supports advanced data link protocols including 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 25 Gigabit LAN
• Optimized for seamless multi-gigabit communication
• Data throughput up to 25 Gbps
• PCI Express bus interface for efficient bandwidth utilization
• Low-profile plug-in card design for space-constrained environments

Compatibility and Deployment

• Engineered for Dell PowerEdge R6515, R6525, and R7515 servers
• Ideal for enterprise workloads requiring reliable high-speed networking
• Supports scalable infrastructure with enhanced link stability

Technical Advantages

• Streamlined installation with plug-in card format
• Compact low-profile form factor ensures flexibility in rack-mounted systems
• Designed to deliver consistent performance under demanding workloads

Key Benefits

• Boosts server efficiency with dual-port connectivity
• Ensures rapid data exchange for virtualization and cloud applications
• Provides enterprise-grade reliability and compatibility

Dell Mellanox ConnectX-5 10/25GbE Network Adapter

The Dell 540-BDIN, powered by Mellanox ConnectX-5 EN technology, represents a pivotal advancement in enterprise and data center networking. This dual-port SFP28 PCI-Express network adapter is engineered to deliver exceptional throughput, ultra-low latency, and robust offload capabilities for the most demanding workloads. Serving as a cornerstone for modern IT infrastructure, it bridges the gap between legacy 10GbE networks and the emerging demands of 25GbE, providing a seamless, high-performance upgrade path for server connectivity, storage networks, and high-performance computing clusters.

Key Specifications

At its core, the Dell 540-BDIN is built for reliability and peak performance. Its specifications define a card suited for the next generation of data-intensive applications.

Form Factor and Physical Interface

The adapter conforms to a standard low-profile PCI-Express form factor, ensuring broad compatibility with a wide range of server chassis from rackmount to blade systems. It is typically shipped with both a full-height and a low-profile bracket, allowing installation in servers of varying sizes. The primary interface is a PCI-Express 3.0 x8 host interface, which provides ample bandwidth to handle the bidirectional traffic of two ports operating at 25GbE simultaneously without becoming a bottleneck. This ensures data flows smoothly between the network and the server's memory subsystem.

Core Hardware Components

The adapter is centered around the Mellanox ConnectX-5 EN dual-port ASIC, a proven and powerful controller designed for efficiency and speed. It interfaces with the host system via a PCI-Express 3.0 x8 slot, ensuring ample bandwidth for bidirectional traffic on both ports simultaneously without bottlenecking. The card is typically configured in a standard-height, full-length form factor, designed for broad compatibility with rackmount servers and tower chassis.

Connectivity and Port Details

The adapter features two SFP28 ports. These ports are highly versatile, supporting a wide range of connectivity options. They are backward compatible with standard 10GbE SFP+ optics and direct-attach copper (DAC) cables, while also fully enabling 25GbE speeds with appropriate SFP28 transceivers or DACs. This flexibility allows for incremental network upgrades and protects existing infrastructure investments.

Supported Data Rates and Standards

The Dell 540-BDIN operates at line rates of 10 Gigabits per second (Gb/s) and 25 Gb/s per port. It supports Ethernet standards including 10GBASE and 25GBASE variants. The card's design is optimized for the efficiency gains of 25GbE, which offers 2.5 times the bandwidth of 10GbE at a typically lower cost-per-bit and power consumption compared to deploying multiple 10GbE links.

Performance and Advanced Offload Capabilities

Beyond raw speed, the true value of the ConnectX-5 adapter lies in its sophisticated suite of hardware offload engines. These features dramatically reduce CPU overhead, liberating server processors for application workloads and improving overall system efficiency and response times.

Accelerated Processing

The adapter features comprehensive stateless offloads such as TCP/UDP checksum, Large Send Offload (LSO), and Receive Side Scaling (RSS). These ensure that network packet processing is handled efficiently in hardware, minimizing interrupt load on the host CPU and lowering latency for critical applications.

RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) Support

A defining feature of the Mellanox ConnectX-5 series is its robust support for RDMA, including RoCE v1 and RoCE v2. RDMA allows data to be transferred directly from the memory of one computer to another without involving the operating system or CPU of either machine. This results in sub-microsecond latencies, extremely high throughput, and significantly reduced CPU utilization, making it ideal for storage area networks (SANs like NVMe-oF), distributed databases, and machine learning frameworks.

NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) Initiator

The card is a premier choice for deploying high-performance, software-defined storage. Its full hardware offload for NVMe over Fabrics over RoCE transforms network storage, allowing remote SSDs to perform nearly as if they were locally attached. This enables the creation of disaggregated, scalable, and ultra-low-latency storage pools that are essential for modern data centers.

Virtualization and Cloud Enhancements

The adapter excels in virtualized and cloud environments through advanced hardware-assisted virtualization features.

SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization)

With support for numerous Virtual Functions (VFs), SR-IOV allows a single physical port to be securely shared among multiple virtual machines. Each VM gets direct, dedicated access to a slice of the hardware, bypassing the hypervisor's virtual switch for network data. This delivers near-native network performance, lower latency, and reduced host CPU load for virtualization hosts running VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, or KVM.

Open vSwitch (OVS) Offloads

For environments using OVS for network virtualization, the ConnectX-5 can offload the entire OVS data plane to its hardware. This eliminates a major source of CPU overhead in OpenStack and other cloud platforms, dramatically improving packet switching performance and freeing up CPU cores for revenue-generating virtual machines and containers.

Deployment Scenarios and Use Cases

The versatility of the Dell 540-BDIN makes it a critical component across a wide spectrum of IT infrastructure.

Data Center Server Networking

As a high-speed NIC for rack servers, it provides the essential network backbone for web tier, application tier, and database tier servers. Upgrading from 1GbE or 10GbE to 25GbE with this adapter alleviates network bottlenecks, improves application response times, and enhances server consolidation ratios by supporting more VMs or containers per host.

Storage Area Network (SAN) Connectivity

The card is perfectly suited for connecting servers to high-performance iSCSI or NVMe-oF storage arrays. The combination of 25GbE bandwidth and RDMA offloads ensures that storage traffic does not become a limiting factor, maximizing ROI on all-flash arrays and enabling real-time analytics on large datasets.

High-Performance Computing (HPC)

In clustered environments where nodes constantly communicate, such as in HPC simulations, financial modeling, or AI training, low-latency and high-bandwidth are non-negotiable. The ConnectX-5's RDMA capabilities facilitate efficient message passing interface (MPI) traffic, drastically reducing job completion times and improving cluster efficiency.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI)

In HCI platforms like VMware vSAN or Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, the network is the storage backplane. The Dell 540-BDIN provides the high-throughput, low-latency, and CPU-efficient network required for reliable and performant HCI deployments, ensuring that storage replication and data rebalancing operations do not impact running workloads.

Wide Compatibility

The Dell-branded Mellanox ConnectX-5 adapter is designed for seamless integration within enterprise ecosystems.

Dell Server Compatibility

This adapter is tested, validated, and certified for optimal performance across a wide range of Dell PowerEdge server platforms, including the 14th generation (e.g., R640, R740, R740xd, R840) and newer. It is fully supported by Dell's lifecycle controller, iDRAC management, and driver repositories, ensuring straightforward deployment and maintenance within homogeneous Dell environments.

Advanced Features and Technologies

Delving deeper into the architecture reveals features that cater to sophisticated networking demands.

Security Features

Security is integrated at the hardware level. The adapter supports IEEE 802.1AE (MACsec) link-level encryption, providing hop-by-hop security to protect data in flight between the server and the adjacent switch port without incurring significant performance penalties. This is crucial for meeting compliance requirements in multi-tenant or regulated environments.

TLS and IPsec Offload

For higher-layer security, the ConnectX-5 can offload TLS and IPsec cryptographic operations. This accelerates encrypted traffic (such as HTTPS or VPN connections), enabling high-speed secure communications without overburdening the server's CPUs.

Network Programmability

Through support for technologies like eSwitch and the Mellanox ASAP² technology, the adapter offers a level of network programmability. This enables more flexible, software-defined network policies and integration with cloud orchestration frameworks, future-proofing the investment.

Considerations for Implementation

Successful deployment requires attention to several key factors beyond the adapter itself.

Cabling and Transceiver Options

To achieve 25GbE speeds, SFP28 transceivers and cables are required. Options include SFP28 SR optical modules for multi-mode fiber (MMF) over short distances, LR modules for single-mode fiber (SMF) over long distances, and SFP28 Direct Attach Copper (DAC) cables for cost-effective, low-latency connections within a rack or between adjacent racks. For 10GbE operation, standard SFP+ optics and DACs are fully compatible.

Switch Infrastructure Requirements

To utilize the 25GbE capability, the adapter must be connected to a switch with compatible SFP28 ports. A wide array of top-of-rack (ToR) and aggregation switches from Dell, Cisco, Arista, and others support 25GbE. Ensuring proper switch configuration for features like Jumbo Frames (MTU 9000), Flow Control, and if using RDMA, Lossless Ethernet (via PFC and ECN) is critical for optimal performance.

Power Consumption

The Dell 540-BDIN is designed with enterprise power efficiency in mind. Typical power consumption is moderate given its performance class, but proper server airflow should be maintained. The card's active heatsink is engineered to dissipate heat effectively in the constrained airflow environment of a densely packed server chassis.