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Used Solarflare cards can be had for ~$300. Warning, the fancier features are disabled on cheap cards; you pay Solarflare to upgrade the firmware to get access. The kernel-bypass software and kernel driver (for setup) are usually free to download. A new ExaNIC might be $2000? last I checked. Netronome, maybe $1200?

You can get experience with ordinary Intel hardware and AF_XDP or DPDK.

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I'll add that you should look for the PLUS skus, ie SFN-8522-PLUS. They come with all the fun stuff.

Might also want to look at Packet. They offer bare metal cloud servers by the hour, some of which have Mellanox NICs in them[0]. I'm less familiar with Mellanox than SolarFlare, but I think they have a similar feature set.

[0] https://www.packet.com/cloud/servers/c3-small/

Thank you, I was not aware of Packet.

My employer's customers don't use Mellanox anymore, so I haven't. I don't know why they don't, but would not be surprised if price had something to do with it.

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