P14488-001 HPE Mellanox 200GB QSFP56 PCI-E 4.0 x16 1 Port Network Adapter

Product Overview of HPE P14488-001 1 Port Network Adapter

The HPE P14488-001 represents a pinnacle category in high-performance networking: the 200 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) PCI-Express adapter. Built on the legacy of Mellanox's InfiniBand and Ethernet innovation, now fully integrated into HPE's portfolio, this category is engineered for the most demanding data-intensive workloads.

General Information

• Manufacturer: HPE
• Part Number: P14488-001
• Product Type: 1 Port Network Adapter

Technical Highlights

• Compact plug-in card design
• Bus Type: PCI Express 4.0 x16
• Compliance: PCIe 4.0 specification
• Single QSFP56 port supporting 200 Gigabit bandwidth

Supported Protocols

• Gigabit Ethernet (1 GbE)
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet
• 25 Gb LAN
• 40 Gb LAN
• 50 Gb LAN
• 100 Gigabit Ethernet

Data Transfer Performance

• Maximum throughput: 100 Gbps

Network & Transport Compatibility

• Protocols: iSCSI, IPv4, IPv6

System Integration

Designed For

• HPE ProLiant DL110 Gen10
• HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10
• HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen10
• HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10
• HPE ProLiant DL365 Gen10
• HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10
• HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10

Understanding of HPE P14488-001 200GbE Network Adapter

The HPE P14488-001, powered by NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx technology, represents a cornerstone in high-performance networking for modern data centers. This single-port 200GbE QSFP56 network adapter is engineered to deliver exceptional bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and advanced offload capabilities, directly addressing the demands of compute-intensive, data-driven workloads. By leveraging PCI-Express 4.0 x16 host interface, it ensures maximum data throughput between the network and the server, eliminating bottlenecks and enabling faster data processing, analytics, and storage access.

Form Factor

The adapter follows a standard full-height, full-length (FHFL) PCI-Express card design, ensuring compatibility with a wide range of server chassis from HPE ProLiant, HPE Apollo, and other standard rackmount platforms. The critical hardware interface is the PCI-Express 4.0 x16 host bus. Unlike previous generations (PCIe 3.0), the Gen4 interface provides double the per-lane data rate, allowing the 200GbE bandwidth to be fully saturated without being constrained by the bus itself. The single physical port is a QSFP56 (Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable 56) cage. This port is hardware-enabled for 200GbE using a single PAM4 modulated transceiver but is also backward compatible with QSFP28 (50GbE, 100GbE) and QSFP+ (40GbE) optics and direct-attach cables, providing significant investment protection and deployment flexibility.

Core Technology and Architecture

The adapter is built upon a sophisticated architecture designed for efficiency and raw performance. Its core components work in unison to provide a seamless and accelerated network pipeline.

Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx Network Controller

At the heart of the HPE P14488-001 is the ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNIC. This chip goes beyond a simple network interface controller; it is a fully programmable, feature-rich engine that offloads critical networking, security, and storage functions from the host CPU. This architectural shift frees up valuable server processing cycles for application workloads, effectively increasing overall server performance and efficiency. The ConnectX-6 Dx is pivotal in enabling features like SR-IOV, NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) initiator and target, and advanced security protocols directly on the adapter.

PCI-Express 4.0 x16 Host Interface

The PCIe 4.0 x16 interface is a critical enabler of the adapter's performance. Compared to previous PCIe 3.0 generations, PCIe 4.0 doubles the bandwidth per lane. With sixteen lanes, the adapter boasts a theoretical bidirectional bandwidth of up to 128 GB/s (256 GT/s). This massive pipe ensures that the 200Gb/s (25 GB/s) network data can flow to and from the server's memory and CPU without contention, preventing the network card itself from becoming a system bottleneck. This is essential for sustaining full line-rate performance with large data streams.

200GbE QSFP56 Network Interface

The single 200GbE port utilizes a QSFP56 (Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable 56) transceiver form factor. This interface supports both Ethernet and InfiniBand networking protocols, offering deployment flexibility. It is designed to operate over standard duplex multimode (OM3/OM4) or single-mode fiber optic cabling. The 200Gb/s data rate is achieved using 4-level Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM4) signaling over four optical lanes at 50 Gbps per lane. The port is fully backward compatible, allowing it to accept QSFP28 (100GbE) and QSFP+ (40GbE) transceivers with appropriate speed negotiation, protecting existing infrastructure investments.

Performance and Offload Capabilities

Raw bandwidth is only part of the story. The true value of the HPE P14488-001 lies in its intelligent offload engines that reduce CPU overhead, decrease latency, and improve system determinism.

Accelerated Switching

The Mellanox ASAP2 technology offloads the Open vSwitch (OVS) data plane entirely to the adapter's hardware. This means virtual switch packet forwarding, tunneling (VXLAN, NVGRE, GENEVE), and classification are handled at line rate without consuming host CPU resources. This results in significantly higher virtual machine density, consistent low latency for east-west traffic, and improved power efficiency per virtual network function.

NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) Acceleration

This adapter is a key component for building high-performance, disaggregated storage networks. It provides full hardware offload for NVMe over Fabrics, functioning as both an initiator (client) and a target (storage array). By offloading the NVMe-oF transport protocol (RoCE or iWARP), it delivers near-local SSD performance over the network with extremely low latency and minimal CPU utilization, enabling efficient shared storage pools for AI training, big data analytics, and high-performance databases.

Precision Timing and Low Latency

For financial trading, high-performance computing (HPC), and real-time analytics, predictable ultra-low latency is non-negotiable. The ConnectX-6 Dx chip features hardware-based precision timestamping with nanosecond accuracy, supporting PTP (IEEE 15888) and SyncE standards. Combined with RDMA capabilities, this ensures the fastest possible data transfer with the highest level of timing synchronization across the data center.

Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)

RDMA allows data to be moved directly from the network adapter into application memory, bypassing the operating system kernel and CPU. The HPE P14488-001 supports both RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) and InfiniBand transport for RDMA. This dramatically reduces latency, lowers CPU overhead, and increases message rates, which is crucial for MPI-based HPC clusters, machine learning frameworks, and low-latency storage access.

Advanced Security and Virtualization Features

In multi-tenant cloud and virtualized environments, security and isolation are paramount. This adapter provides robust hardware-enforced capabilities to address these needs.

IPsec and TLS Inline Cryptography Offload

To secure data in motion without sacrificing performance, the adapter includes dedicated hardware engines for inline encryption and decryption. It fully offloads IPsec (including AES-GCM 256-bit encryption) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocols. This means encrypted traffic is processed at full 200Gb/s line rate, eliminating the performance penalty typically associated with software-based encryption and protecting sensitive data with minimal overhead.

Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV)

SR-IOV allows a single physical adapter to present itself as multiple, isolated virtual functions (VFs) that can be assigned directly to virtual machines or containers. Each VF has its own dedicated resources and guaranteed quality of service. This provides near-bare-metal network performance for VMs, improves security through hardware isolation, and reduces virtualization overhead on the host hypervisor.

Hardware-Based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)

For the most stringent security requirements, the adapter supports a hardware-based TEE. This creates a secure, isolated environment on the NIC itself for running trusted applications or managing encryption keys, protecting them from potential compromise of the host server's main operating system.

Deployment and Compatibility

The HPE P14488-001 is designed for seamless integration into enterprise and cloud data center environments, with broad support across industry-standard platforms and software.

Physical Specifications

The adapter conforms to the standard low-profile (LP) PCIe form factor, with a full-height bracket included for compatibility with most server chassis. Its design prioritizes efficient thermal dissipation to maintain reliability under continuous full load. The card is compliant with the IEEE 802.3bs standard for 200GbE operation.

Key Specifications at a Glance

Interface and Data Rate

Single-port 200 Gigabit Ethernet (200GbE) via QSFP56. Supports data rates of 200Gb/s, 100Gb/s, 50Gb/s, 40Gb/s, and 25Gb/s via backward compatibility and breakout cables. Protocol support includes Ethernet and InfiniBand.

Host Bus

PCI-Express 4.0 x16 host interface, fully backward compatible with PCIe 3.0 slots (with proportional reduction in available bandwidth).

Advanced Features

Hardware offload for: RDMA (RoCE v2, InfiniBand), NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) initiator and target, Switch (OVS) acceleration (ASAP2), IPsec and TLS inline cryptography, Precision Time Protocol (PTP), and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) functionality for AWS-like cloud networking.

Virtualization and Security

SR-IOV with support for up to 255 virtual functions. Hardware Root of Trust and Secure Boot. Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) support. Hardware-enforced isolation and quality of service (QoS).

Regulatory and Compliance

The HPE P14488-001 is designed to meet global regulatory and safety standards, including CE, FCC, and UL certifications. It is also compliant with RoHS environmental directives.

Use Cases and Ideal Workloads

The combination of high bandwidth, low latency, and intelligent offloads makes the HPE P14488-001 ideal for a spectrum of demanding applications. It is particularly well-suited for accelerating Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) training clusters, where moving massive datasets between compute nodes and storage is critical. In High-Performance Computing (HPC), it enables faster MPI communications for scientific modeling and simulations. For cloud service providers and enterprises, it forms the backbone of high-performance virtualization, cloud-native microservices architectures, and disaggregated, software-defined storage (SDS) solutions like NVMe-oF arrays. It is also a perfect fit for high-frequency trading platforms and data-intensive analytics engines like Apache Spark.