Intel 500 Series Network Adapters

Today having 1Gbe connectivity within a datacenter is not good enough. These Intel 500 adapters are great for extending the life of older servers at a acceptable price that would be retired due to not having 10Gbe connectivity. It is able able to use existing Cat6 infrastructure saving additional money and time.

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.

I would highly recommend Intel 500 Series for organizations configuring Dell PowerEdge servers. We often use these as affordable connections between Dell servers and a QNAP or Synology NAS (CAT6 RJ45). This works well for an affordable local backup. We typically buy these directly from Dell but have occasionally sourced from other vendors and installed them inside a Dell PowerEdge server without issue.

The Intel Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X540 is a good stable network adapter for use in all types of servers. Intel supports the product well and releases drivers for any operating system we've tried to use. The adapters just work; we have no issues.

It is quite likely that you may encounter Intel Converged Network Adapters as part of an OEM server purchase. For this purpose, there have been no complaints with regards to performance, reliability and driver compatibility.

For retail sales and support, the cost / benefit may not be worth the effort as there are more competitive options out there (such as broadcom).

With the X540 Intel provides a low-cost 10GbE NIC for a wide range of operations. It especially delivers optimum performance when used within an office network as a connection between physical servers with high networking demands. As it's available as RJ45, it is perfectly suitable for small and midsized enterprises. Often, there is no fiber infrastructure available. Especially when it comes to high bandwidth demands within hyper-converged infrastructure, the missing RDMA support is a blocking point but for entry-level to office workloads this is not a problem at all.

Network upgrades - this is a solid, tested, well-supported NIC that does the job. If you need connectivity in a Cat5e or Cat6 building, this is your go-to. We have used it in self-built storage and servers for some time, added it to increase capacity in vendor-built storage and servers, and have upgraded higher-end PCs with this NIC in order to gain redundancy and increased performance.

The most common or well suited place would be a company that is looking to save money and make a smaller investment, at same time save money with power usage as well, and on top of that still get that 10gbe they are looking for and a 8-10x performance boost to the data center.

Is recommended for performance scenarios. Bu if your budget is limited the Intel Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X540 is not recommended.

If your environment is very strict and prescriptive, this adapter might be exactly what you need. It has many features that make managing and implementing it flexible and effective (QoS, traffic management, etc.). But if all you need is a standard network adapter, a time-tested NIC might be better suited since it doesn't require any additional management or learning.