Mellanox ConnectX-4 network controller cards with 100Gb/s Ethernet connectivity provides a high performance and flexible solution for Web 2.0, Cloud, data analytics, database, and storage platforms. 

ConnectX-4 provides an unmatched combination of 100Gb/s bandwidth in a Dual, single port, low latency, and specific hardware offloads, addressing both today’s and the next generation’s compute and storage data center demands. 

NEW FEATURES

– 100Gb/s Ethernet per port

– 1/10/25/40/50/56/100 Gb/s speeds

– Single and dual-port options available

– T10-DIF Signature Handover

– CPU offloading of transport operations

– Application offloading

– Mellanox PeerDirect communication acceleration

– Hardware offloads for NVGRE, VXLAN and GENEVE encapsulated traffic

– End-to-end QoS and congestion control

– Hardware-based I/O virtualization

– RoHS compliant

BENEFITS

– High performance silicon for applications requiring high bandwidth, low latency and high message rate

– World-class cluster, network, and storage performance

– Smart interconnect for x86, Power, Arm, and GPU-based compute and storage platforms

– Cutting-edge performance in virtualized overlay networks NVGRE and GENEVE

– Efficient I/O consolidation, lowering data center costs and complexity

– Virtualization acceleration

– Power efficiency

– Scalability to tens-of-thousands of nodes

RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)

ConnectX-4 supports RoCE specifications delivering low-latency and high-performance over Ethernet networks. Leveraging data center bridging (DCB) capabilities as well as ConnectX-4 EN advanced congestion control hardware mechanisms, 

RoCE provides efficient low-latency RDMA services over Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks.

I/O Virtualization

ConnectX-4 SR-IOV technology provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VMs) within the server. I/O virtualization with ConnectX-4 gives data center administrators better server utilization while reducing cost, power, 

and cable complexity, allowing more Virtual Machines and more tenants on the same hardware.

Overlay Networks

In order to better scale their networks, data center operators often create overlay networks that carry traffic from individual virtual machines over logical tunnels in encapsulated formats such as NVGRE. While this solves network scalability issues, it hides the TCP packet from the hardware offloading engines, 

placing higher loads on the host CPU. ConnectX-4 effectively addresses this by providing advanced NVGRE and GENEVE hardware offloading engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay protocol headers, enabling the traditional offloads to be performed on the encapsulated traffic. With ConnectX-4, 

data center operators can achieve native performance in the new network architecture.

Software Support

All Mellanox adapter cards are supported by Windows, Linux distributions, VMware, FreeBSD, and Citrix XENServer. ConnectX-4 adapters support OpenFabrics-based RDMA protocols and software and are compatible with configuration and management tools from OEMs and operating system vendors.