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Procurement for Direct Fiber (100 Gbps)

Overview

Procurement of equipment for 100 Gbps equipment over fiber requires careful consideration of computer quality, as well as procuring a specialized Network Interface Card with a QSFP port as well as a QSFP transceiver. These cards provide greatly increased network speeds, but typically cannot be used to connect to the traditional wall outlets throughout NYU. These cards are usually bigger, requiring a PCIe x16 lane. We highly recommend reaching out to your IT Department to assist in Optical NIC installation.

Transceivers are specialized devices that convert electrical signals to light and are a required additional piece of equipment needed to use HSRN fiber. The transceiver will be inserted into the Network Interface Card. a fiber patch cord will connect from the transceiver back to the Optical Distribution Box for connectivity.

Both the Network Interface Card and the QSFP transceiver will need to be rated for 100 Gbps.

General Requirements

Computers targeted for 100 Gbps fiber connectivity should be recent, high end desktop equipment or server grade hardware. Laptops will NOT be able to connect to 100 Gbps fiber. Generally, high end 12th generation Intel or later, AMD Threadripper or newer AMD Ryzen CPUs are required to make full use of 100 Gbps. NVMe SSDs for higher read/write to disk should be deployed. If deploying in a desktop tower, please monitor temperature to ensure adequate cooling of the Network Interface Card. Please ensure that your motherboard has the appropriate PCIe availability.

Please ensure that the network card chosen is compatible with your operating system. This can be typically found on the user manual or by asking the vendor.

Nodes will need to be placed near the Optical Distribution Box, or be in a datacenter that has HSRN capabilities.

NIC Recommendations

For 100 Gbps fiber connectivity, we recommend:

Note you will need BOTH the Network card and the transceiver to connect. While there are other network cards available, you will always need the 100GBASE-DR transceiver specifically. Other transceivers may not work on the HSRN.

The supported operating systems of this card and transceiver are below.

Windows Operating Systems supported are below:

  • Windows 8.1 (64 Bit)
  • Windows 10 (64 Bit)
  • Windows 11 (64 Bit)
  • Windows Server 2012 (R2)
  • Windows Server 2016
  • Windows Server 2019
  • Windows Server 2022

Linux support includes (but not limited to):

  • Ubuntu
  • RHEL/Centos/Rocky
  • Oracle Linux
  • Fedora
  • Debian

See also the specific kernel versions and Linux distribution list.

Support

If you have further questions or would like more guidance and hands-on support, please reach out to us at hsrn-support@nyu.edu.