My question is what's is the difference between Gigabit Ethernet Controller and Ethernet Converged Network Adapter?
I want to upgrade my server to 10 Gigabit ethernet, my server vendor recommend me one card but it's very expensive and there are other cheaper ethernet card and since they are all connected with PCI to the board I wanted to know can I use any other PCI ethernet card?
The vendor recommended me to purchase Intel 82599 10GbE Daughter Card, Gen 2 PCIe x8 and I was thinking to buy the Intel® Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X540-T2, I didnt wanted to put useless information but if you need any additional information to answer this question I will happy to share it with you.
Best Answer
Regular Ethernet adapters can ONLY handle regular Ethernet traffic, some offer hardware acceleration while others don't but that's irrelevant. CNAs allow for both regular Ethernet and Data Center Ethernet (DCE) to be transmitted, DCE is a newer protocol that is almost exclusively used for handling Fibre-Channel-over-Ethernet traffic, in fact FCoE demands the use of DCE. Again whether or not a CNA is hardware accelerated is irrelevant to this question, but generally CNAs do offer some degree of acceleration.