SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, announced that its ConnextX-3 40GbE driver has been successfully integrated into VMware vSphere 5.5 to enable a new price/performance record for virtualized data centers. Benchmark results achieved a sustainable rate of more than 37Gb/s of throughput using servers equipped with Mellanox’s ConnectX-3 40GbE NICs connected by SwitchX 40GbE switches and the company’s high performance QSFP+ cables. Compared to 10GbE, the solution increases traffic capacity, allowing four times as many Virtual Machines (VMs) to run on a server, reducing data center complexity, and capital and operation expenses.
Mellanox states that its 40GbE solution enables superior performance for enterprise applications running over VMware vSphere 5.5 using a converged interconnect that delivers both, compute traffic and storage traffic over a single wire. Converging over Mellanox’s 40GbE NIC eliminates the need for multiple Gigabit or 10 Gigabit Ethernet NICs, Fibre Channel HBAs, switches and cables, simplifies data center infrastructure deployment, and helps IT managers to meet their performance goals at a much lower total cost of ownership.
“VMware has worked with Mellanox on key I/O virtualization technologies to offer customers innovative server and storage interconnect solutions,” said Mike Adams, director, Cloud Infrastructure Product Marketing, VMware. “Mellanox’s 40GbE NIC solutions can improve performance within virtualized deployments and help with greater virtual machine density through higher capacity links, a benefit to VMware vSphere 5.5 customers building highly scalable public and private cloud infrastructures.”
Mellanox’s leading end-to-end 40GbE interconnect solution includes the SwitchX-based SX1036 and SX1024 switches, with record breaking performance of 220ns latency and 2.88Tb/s of non-blocking throughput, ConnectX-3 and ConnectX-3 Pro 40GbE NICs to provide greater performance when running enterprise data center applications.
“With the growing demand to deliver faster results to mobile cloud users and the ongoing need to run more applications over a smaller, converged footprint, increasing the number of VMs per server while consolidating the networking infrastructure becomes a critical goal,” said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Using Mellanox’s end-to-end 40GbE interconnect solution over VMware vSphere 5.5 allows IT managers to accelerate business applications and reduces infrastructure costs and power, enhancing their competitiveness in the industry.”
