10G network cards that work in a EMC/Lenovo Storcenter PX12-350r

[TheUnnamedNewbie]

I have a storcenter px12-350r that I'm using as my main nas. It has got 8 1gig connections at the moment (4 by default, 4 more through a network card I had laying around and didn't need for anything else, so under the motto "more ports = more better" decided to put it in even though there is pretty much no point).

I have a few Mellanox ConnectX2 cards, but they don't seem to get recognized. (I think it's driver related - makes sense that they don't include drivers for them in their custom debian-based OS).

Can anyone, with reasonable certainty, tell me if there are other 10g network cards that do work in this NAS? I was thinking of trying an intel card since they pretty much use one big driver lib iirc, but before I go spend another 100 bucks on a second hand intel nic, I would like to hear what people here have to say about it.

Other suggestions related to this (like, someone might know how to get those connectx2 cards to work) are also welcome.
I'm already using the linux active load balancing on the NAS, but, of course, this only helps for multiple connections, and doesn't impact the speed of single file transfers.

 

[Samir]

I know this is a big time bump on this thread, but I just got one of these and wanted to share the answer.

The official card which seems to work straight out of the box is actually a Qlogic/Broadcom BCM957712A1202G. It was sold as Iomega part number 36040. You can find the card on ebay under its Broadcom part number for a reasonable price. I haven't tried to upgrade mine yet, but may in the future.

It would be interesting to know if any other Qlogic/Broadcom cards might work that are in the same family as the BCM957712A1202G if anyone knows what the other Qlogic/Broadcom part numbers might be.

 

[Stephan]

Wisdom of the Ancients

xkcd.com

Never too late to share insights. In three months a homelab enthusiast from Bokhtar, Tajikistan will run up and down the road with joy because you answered the question that has tormented him in his sleep for eight years.

 

[Samir]

So digging a bit more now that I've got to play with this PX12-400R. When looking at dmesg from the console, there's an Intel and Broadcom driver that's there, so I think some of the popular Intel nics should work too. In fact, I recall the driver name is 'ixgbe' I believe which in a search led me to various nics in the x520/x540 line. I should have also remembered the Broadcom driver name as that might have led to some other part numbers--rats, I'm going to have to get that info. Time to power it back up.

Another interesting thing about the PX12-400R is that it natively supports sas drives even though there's nothing about it in the documentation or marketing material. You would think they would put this out as a selling point. It only crossed my mind when I noticed the backplane connectors were sas, not sata. And I didn't think anything of it as synology does this on some of their units. But to my surprise, a 400GB 15k Cheetah drive powered right up and was available in the webui for configuration. Very cool box since it's probably very easy to remove the stock usb dom and put something else, especially with a vga connector and serial port built-in too. I guess the hard part would be finding support for the sas controller, but I'm sure the usual linux flavors can probably handle it.

Okay, so it's booted, ixgbe is the confirmed the driver name for Intel, and the Broadcom one is bnx2x, which has a nice page here that goes into detail on the driver: 10. BNX2X Poll Mode Driver — Data Plane Development Kit 24.03.0 documentation

I think this will definitely open the doors to finding some cheap 10Gb nics for the PX12 series.