P41970-001 HPE Broadcom BCM57504 Overview

The P41970-001 HPE Broadcom BCM57504 10/25Gb 4Ports SFP28 PCI Express 4.0 x16 Network Adapter is engineered to provide exceptional network performance and scalability for data-intensive enterprise workloads. Designed specifically for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) ProLiant servers, this advanced network interface card (NIC) is ideal for modern data centers requiring high-speed and low-latency connectivity.

Leveraging the Broadcom BCM57504 controller, this NIC offers four SFP28 ports capable of delivering flexible 10GbE or 25GbE Ethernet speeds, ensuring compatibility with a wide range of network infrastructures. With its PCI Express Gen 4.0 x16 interface, the adapter achieves faster data throughput and reduced CPU overhead, resulting in enhanced application performance and improved server efficiency.

Core Features and Benefits

High-Speed Connectivity with 10/25GbE SFP28 Ports

The P41970-001 network adapter includes four SFP28 (Small Form-factor Pluggable 28) ports, enabling support for both 10GbE and 25GbE speeds depending on your networking environment. This flexibility ensures that enterprises can scale their network capacity without replacing hardware, promoting investment protection and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

Broadcom BCM57504 Controller Advantages

The Broadcom BCM57504 is a powerful and energy-efficient Ethernet controller offering extensive virtualization and offload capabilities. It supports advanced networking features such as RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), VXLAN, NVGRE offloads, and TCP/UDP/IP checksum offload. These features reduce CPU utilization, accelerate network traffic, and improve system performance across demanding workloads.

PCIe Gen 4.0 x16 Bus Interface

By adopting the PCIe Gen4 x16 interface, the adapter delivers significantly higher bandwidth than previous PCIe generations. The increased throughput benefits data-intensive applications such as hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and real-time data analytics, where data movement across the network is critical.

Compatibility with HPE ProLiant Servers

The HPE P41970-001 is validated for use with a wide range of HPE ProLiant Gen10 and Gen10 Plus servers. This ensures seamless integration into enterprise environments and optimal support from HPE's firmware, tools, and management ecosystem. With HPE’s server management technologies such as HPE iLO and HPE OneView, administrators can monitor, configure, and update the NIC through a unified interface.

Compatibility testing with HPE hardware guarantees optimal thermal, electrical, and physical fitment, reducing deployment times and avoiding costly downtime or interoperability issues. In addition, the adapter supports hot-pluggable transceivers and cables, allowing quick network reconfiguration and upgrades.

Advanced Networking Capabilities

Virtualization and Offload Features

The BCM57504 controller embedded in the P41970-001 offers hardware-based virtualization features like SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization), VMDq, and DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) acceleration. These features enable better VM-to-VM communication and reduce latency in virtualized environments such as VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Red Hat KVM.

Offloading common networking tasks such as checksum calculation, large send offload (LSO), receive-side scaling (RSS), and TCP segmentation offload (TSO) frees up server CPU resources, allowing the host to focus on critical workloads instead of network processing.

 For Network Tunneling Protocols

This NIC is designed for cloud-native and software-defined networking (SDN) environments, offering full support for encapsulation protocols like VXLAN (Virtual Extensible LAN) and NVGRE (Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation). These tunneling protocols are essential in multi-tenant data centers where isolation, scalability, and mobility are critical.

Hardware offload support for VXLAN/NVGRE ensures that encapsulated traffic does not degrade performance, making the P41970-001 ideal for use in private clouds, hybrid cloud deployments, and service provider networks.

Reliable, Secure, and Scalable Networking

The Broadcom BCM57504 chipset includes built-in support for secure boot, firmware validation, and secure firmware updates, ensuring the integrity of networking firmware. The adapter adheres to trusted HPE security standards, helping enterprises meet compliance regulations and reduce exposure to cyber threats.

For scaling large network environments, this NIC supports link aggregation (LACP) and adaptive load balancing, allowing multiple network links to function as a single logical link. This enhances fault tolerance and increases throughput across applications and users.

Use Cases and Applications

Data Center and Cloud Deployments

The P41970-001 is engineered to meet the high throughput demands of next-generation data centers. Supporting both 10GbE and 25GbE speeds, it enables flexible network architecture for on-premises, hybrid, and private cloud infrastructures. It is well-suited for use in top-of-rack (ToR) or end-of-row (EoR) configurations where density, speed, and reliability are paramount.

High-Performance Computing (HPC)

In HPC environments, where latency and data throughput are critical, the adapter’s RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) support ensures direct memory access across nodes with minimal CPU involvement. This accelerates data movement in parallel processing frameworks and reduces wait times for compute-intensive applications such as scientific simulations, weather modeling, and complex data processing.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) and Virtualization

As enterprises move towards software-defined everything (SDx), HCI solutions benefit from high-throughput, low-latency network adapters like the HPE P41970-001. Whether running VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, or Nutanix, the NIC ensures predictable I/O performance and better VM density per host.

Transceiver and Cable Compatibility

The HPE P41970-001 network adapter supports a variety of optical transceivers and DAC cables, including:

• HPE SFP28 25G SR, LR, and DAC options
• Backward compatibility with 10G SFP+ modules
• Passive and active Direct Attach Copper (DAC) cables for cost-effective short-reach deployments

This versatility in media types ensures that data centers can deploy a consistent networking strategy regardless of physical topologies or link distance requirements.

Driver and Firmware Ecosystem

Broadcom and HPE collaborate to offer updated drivers for major operating systems such as Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, VMware vSphere, and more. Firmware tools such as HPE Smart Update Manager (SUM) and HPE Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP) simplify deployment and lifecycle management.

Product Category Relevance

Network Interface Cards (NICs)

This product belongs to the high-performance category of enterprise-grade network interface cards. NICs like the HPE P41970-001 are essential components in server infrastructure, allowing for connectivity to internal and external network fabrics with ultra-low latency and high bandwidth.

25GbE Network Adapters

The rise of 25 Gigabit Ethernet (25GbE) as the next mainstream networking speed standard is addressed by this adapter. 25GbE offers a cost-effective upgrade path from 10GbE while avoiding the complexity and expense of 40GbE, making this adapter a strategic investment.

PCIe Gen4 Server Components

As PCIe Gen4 adoption grows, compatible NICs such as this one become vital for maximizing throughput in next-gen servers. The bandwidth improvements allow faster access to networking and storage resources, creating an overall faster and more responsive server environment.

Why Enterprises Choose HPE Network Adapters

Enterprise IT teams rely on HPE for delivering mission-critical infrastructure, and the P41970-001 fits into this strategy seamlessly. Its performance, reliability, and scalability make it a go-to solution for data centers looking to enhance their server’s network capabilities. With support for multi-gigabit workloads, seamless virtualization integration, and strong lifecycle management, the adapter aligns with modern digital transformation goals.

Whether it is deployed in edge computing environments, AI/ML clusters, or traditional enterprise workloads, the HPE Broadcom BCM57504 4-port NIC delivers results. Featuring robust diagnostics, manageable thermal profiles, and full compatibility with HPE system tools, the card enables IT administrators to plan, deploy, and scale networks with confidence.