Atop the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, a remarkable glass-fronted skyscraper where you can practically feel New York City’s invincible spirit, Mellanox announced the world’s first end-to-end 10/25/40/50 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity on June 17, 2015, in the newly opened Observatory at One World Trade Center. ConnectX-4 Lx, a new network adapter, is designed to serve as direct replacement for commonly deployed 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters in Web 2.0, cloud, data analytics, database and storage platforms, delivering optimal cost-performance and scalable connectivity. While Spectrum, the next generation of its Open Ethernet-based switch IC, is designed to overcome current data center challenges by providing a highly flexible and scalable solution, allowing businesses to deploy the hardware-software combinations best suited to meet their unique needs.
Computing and storage infrastructures are at a critical point due to convergence of dozens of industry trends pushing them to the brink, as data sets grow exponentially, threatening the unique competitive differentiator of many businesses. “The performance expectations placed on data centers today are unprecedented and require organizations to make infrastructure decisions that meet today’s demands while anticipating future growth needs,” said Rohit Mehra, vice president of network infrastructure, IDC. “Next-generation cloud data centers need network infrastructure solutions that have the flexibility and scalability to handle dramatically increasing data sets while remaining cost-effective from both the operational and capital expense perspective.”
ConnectX-4 Lx supports Multi-Host technology, which enables multiple compute and storage hosts to connect to a single adapter while maintaining high-performance levels and reducing overall data center CAPEX and OPEX. ConnectX-4 Lx also includes native hardware support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), stateless offload engines and GPUDirect. Together with Mellanox’s Spectrum 10/25/40/50 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet switches, the company now offers a complete end-to-end Ethernet solution for cloud, Web 2.0, data analytics, artificial intelligence and enterprise data centers. Data center users and managers can upgrade from 10 to 25 or from 40 to 50 or 100Gb/s performance.
The Spectrum switch’s key features include
- compliance with 100GbE, 40GbE and 10GbE; full support for the 25G and 50G Ethernet Consortium specification; full support for 56GbE operation
- integrated 32 100GbE ports, 32 40/56GbE ports, 64 10GbE ports, 64 25GbE ports and 64 50GbE ports
- world-first non-blocking 100GbE switch across all packet sizes
- lowest power consumption: 135W at full 100GbE line rate on all ports
- support for twice the number of Virtual Machines versus competition
- sub 300ns cut-through port-to-port latency in full load scenarios
- overlay gateway and tunneling support, including VXLAN, NVGRE, Geneve, MPLS, IPinIP
- integrated, dynamically-configurable packet buffer
- embedded low-latency RoCEv2 support for high performance storage and compute fabrics
“We are forecasting a very strong uptake in 100 Gigabit Ethernet data center switching, with shipments increasing from approximately 10,000 in 2014 to over 10 million by 2019,” said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. “With the introduction of this high-density 100 Gigabit Ethernet switch, Mellanox is in a position to take advantage of the pent-up bandwidth demand in cloud data centers, where it already has had considerable success with its high-speed low-latency adapter products.”
“With the overwhelming explosion of data as a result of increased numbers of devices supporting engagement technologies, such as mobile and social, the high speed and reduced latency offered by Mellanox’s Spectrum switch will help ensure instant response on transactions and deliver real time value,” added Dexter Henderson, vice president and business line executive, IBM Power Systems. “The switch helps deliver upon the foundational elements of Power Systems: Increased cloud economics and efficiency, designed from the ground up for big data, all underpinned by open innovation.”
For further information, visit http://www.mellanox.com/ethernet/