It has taken a while, but the R740xd s2drn documents are here.
The deployment guide has been updated, the (firmware) support matrix and a first known issue with an RDMA driver. I haven’t had the time to delve into the details, but I will followup with some more details as I find them. There are some things I already had asked at Dell, so I can share them with you already:
I already wrote about the BOSS card to boot the system from, but I prefer using the flexbays and asked Dell if this is still supported
"There are still a lot of things possible but they might need to be validated by the S2D team. Technically there is no reason for it not to work."
I can see Qlogic in the setups, is that a Dell preference? How about the 40/50/100G cards from Mellanox? We standardized on 40Gb with breakout cabling, which is just for RDMA (for normal traffic we use 10BaseT-10Gb). Do we still have S2D support if we buy the cards from Mellanox directly? They offer much better/faster/easier firmware support than dell (we had to wait a year to get the ConnectX3 firmware on the OEM branded Mellanox cards.
"We do support other NIC’s than Qlogic, like Mellanox. Yes you still have to purchase the Dell Mellanox cards otherwise we are unable to manage and update those cards from our iDRAC/LifeCycle Controller. I’m aware that the Dell firmware for the Mellanox cards took a long time. This is something we intend to fix in the future. The reason was partilly due to the the 14G introductions and preparations although that is an excuses in my opinion as well."
I don’t see the P4500/P4600 that was expected as replacement for the P3600/P3700, what happened to this? If you have them available, do you have specs?
"They will come at a later date, the roadmap info I have is beginning of Q4"
As I said, I will follow-up with the details I will find. We have 2 pending S2D installs that will be R740xd that can move forward now, so I’m sure I have more details to share!