Intel 500 Series Network Adapters

These are a great way to upgrade servers that may not come with a 10Gbe nic which makes use of existing cat6 cabling within the datacenter, once you have the appropriate switches to connect. With this, we extended the lifespan of several servers that had 1GB NICs.

Incentivized

• Uses RJ45 ports, allowing you to use existing Cat6/7 infrastructure.
• Widely supported by OSs, as to be expected with Intel adapters.
• Relatively low cost upgrade for a massive speed boost.

Incentivized

• Expensive (especially when purchased through Dell server configuration).

Incentivized

Intel's price was a bit higher, but the long product lifecycle, overall reliability and manageability made it the clear winner for us. The others do perform well, but when an upgrade is needed I trust products that have been supported, will continue to receive support, and are easy to RMA when needed. Intel's X540 provides all of this.

Incentivized

• Very low cost of entry to 10 GbE speeds for specific areas of our network.
• Re-use of existing Cat6/7 cabling required no expenditure on infrastructure, other than the cost of buying the X540 cards.
• The vastly improved network performance with 10 GbE allows us to make better use of our time, less time waiting for operations to complete.

Incentivized