NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx SmartNIC Announced

Today at GTC in Santa Clara, NVIDIA announced the first secure SmartNIC that is optimized for 25G, the NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx SmartNIC. Designed to provide advanced network offloads to accelerate cloud and enterprise workloads, the new SmartNIC is highly secure and able to hit 25/50Gb/s speeds.

Today at GTC in Santa Clara, NVIDIA announced the first secure SmartNIC that is optimized for 25G, the NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx SmartNIC. Designed to provide advanced network offloads to accelerate cloud and enterprise workloads, the new SmartNIC is highly secure and able to hit 25/50Gb/s speeds.

This marks an expansion of the Mellanox ConnectX family and the first under NVIDIA. This is the eleventh-generation product of ConnectX. The NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx is aimed at modern data centers where 25Gb/s connections are not only more common but in some cases the standard. With AI and real-time analysis workloads, faster connection is a necessity. Beyond just a faster connection speed, the new SmartNIC leverages software-defined, hardware- accelerated engines to offload more security and network processing from CPUs, accelerating speeds.

From a security stand point, the ConnectX-6 Lx SmartNIC is said to offer advanced security. This is done through accelerated security features such as IPsec in-line cryptography and Hardware Root of Trust, and a 10x performance improvement for Connection Tracking, enable Zero Trust security throughout the data center. 

NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx SmartNIC Key Features:

• Two ports of 25Gb/s, or a single port of 50Gb/s, Ethernet connectivity with PCIe Gen 3.0/4.0 x8 host connectivity
• Security features including Hardware Root of Trust, Connection Tracking for stateful L4 firewalls, and in-line IPSec cryptography acceleration
• GPUDirect RDMA acceleration for NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage, scale-out accelerated computing and high-speed video transfer applications
• Zero Touch RoCE (ZTR) for scalable, easy-to-deploy, best-in-class RoCE without switch configuration
• Accelerated switching and packet processing (ASAP2), with built-in SR-IOV and VirtIO hardware offloads for virtualization and containerization, to accelerate software-defined networking and connection tracking for next-generation firewall services

Availability

The NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx SmartNIC is sampling now, with general availability expected in the third quarter of 2020.

NVIDIA

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