Mellanox Announces ConnectX-3 Pro Adapter Cards

Mellanox is announcing its ConnectX-3 Pro 10/40 gigabit Ethernet adapter cards with hardware offload engines that are the first interconnect cards to support overlay networks found in cloud environments including VXLAN and NVGRE. ConnectX-3 Pro cards enable cloud providers to build much larger-scale infrastructures without having to rely overly much on CPU overhead. This is made possible since the overlay technologies are implemented within the interconnect hardware itself. Being the first cards to support overlay networks, the Mellanox ConnextX-3 Pro offers the unique positioning of scaling applications and essentially unlimited tenants.

Mellanox is announcing its ConnectX-3 Pro 10/40 gigabit Ethernet adapter cards with hardware offload engines that are the first interconnect cards to support overlay networks found in cloud environments including VXLAN and NVGRE. ConnectX-3 Pro cards enable cloud providers to build much larger-scale infrastructures without having to rely overly much on CPU overhead. This is made possible since the overlay technologies are implemented within the interconnect hardware itself. Being the first cards to support overlay networks, the Mellanox ConnextX-3 Pro offers the unique positioning of scaling applications and essentially unlimited tenants.

Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro Specifications

• 1us MPI ping latency
• Up to 40 Gigabit Ethernet per port
• Single- and Dual-Port options available
• PCI Express 3.0 (up to 8GT/s)
• CPU offload of transport operations
• Application offload
• Precision Clock Synchronization
• HW Offloads for NVGRE and VXLAN encapsulated traffic
• End-to-end QoS and congestion control
• Hardware-based I/O virtualization
• RoHS-R6

Overlay networks are being used to move traffic from VMs using NVGRE and VXLAN which are encapsulated formats. This movement via a sort of tunnel removes the workload from its network address creating an additional layer. The offloads are then performed within the encapsulated formats. The ConnectX-3 Pro cards will decrease costs while increasing the number of ID’s possible from thousands to potentially millions. The new cards scale-up without reducing performance or efficiency of the infrastructure. Creating even more flexibility, the ConnectX-3 Pro is compatible with Mellanox’s existing ConnectX-3 line of adapters.

Availability

ConnectX-3 Pro is currently available for sampling with general availability arriving in May 2013.

Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro

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