The Intel X520 Dual-Port 10 Gigabit Ethernet SFP+ Embedded Adapter for IBM System x is powered by an Intel Ethernet 82599 third-generation 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller. This card offers full line-rate 10 Gigabit per second performance for high-I/O intensive clients, and showcases the next generation of 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking features for the enterprise network and data center. This adapter uses IBM System x Mezzanine design, which does not use a PCIe slot.
The new Intel X520 Dual-Port 10 Gigabit Ethernet SFP+ Embedded Adapter for IBM System x provides great networking performance, whether as a standard NIC, or with the physical port configured in an emulation mode using the virtual switch in the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM), or directly assigned to a virtual machine. In the emulation mode, the Intel I/O technology and Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) optimize network performance by offloading data sorting and copying from the software Virtual Switch in the VMM to the Intel Ethernet 82599 10-Gigabit Controller.