Dell Broadcom 57840S Quad-Port 10GbE SFP+ Network Card

Dell 57840S SFP Network Card — Quad 10GbE for High-Throughput PowerEdge Networking

The Dell 57840S SFP network card is a high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter built on the Broadcom BCM57840 controller. With four SFP+ ports and a PCIe 3.0 x8 host interface, it delivers 40Gbps aggregate server-side bandwidth from a single expansion slot. This capacity suits virtualisation hosts, storage servers and application nodes where 1GbE links have become a throughput bottleneck.

SFP+ connectivity provides flexibility in cabling approach. Short Direct Attach Copper cables are the cost-effective choice for top-of-rack switch connections within the same rack or adjacent rows. Optical SFP+ transceivers extend reach for inter-row or longer cross-data-centre connections where fibre cabling is already in place.

Protocol Offload Capabilities

The Broadcom BCM57840 supports iSCSI and FCoE hardware offload, removing storage protocol processing from the host CPU and improving storage throughput under load. RoCE enables low-latency remote direct memory access between servers — relevant for clustered databases and high-performance computing workloads. SR-IOV partitions physical ports into virtual functions, assigning dedicated NIC bandwidth directly to individual virtual machines without passing through a software switch, reducing latency for network-intensive workloads.

Management and OS Support

The Dell 57840S SFP network card integrates with Dell OpenManage and iDRAC for port health monitoring and link state reporting. Drivers are available for VMware ESXi, Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu Server. The Broadcom 57840 chipset appears on the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide with inbox driver support in current ESXi releases, simplifying initial deployment without additional driver downloads.

The Dell 57840S SFP network card is available from Briggi Tech with nationwide delivery across South Africa.

Browse all 10GbE server network cards at Briggi Tech or view full specs at Dell.