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Mellanox Enables End-to-End 100Gb/s Interconnect Solution with Introduction of ConnectX-4 Adapter
[November 12, 2014]

Mellanox Enables End-to-End 100Gb/s Interconnect Solution with Introduction of ConnectX-4 Adapter


SUNNYVALE, Calif. & YOKNEAM, Israel --(Business Wire)--

Mellanox (News - Alert)® Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ:MLNX), a leading supplier of end-to-end interconnect solutions for servers and storage systems, today announced the ConnectX-4 single/dual-port 100Gb/s Virtual Protocol Interconnect® (VPI) adapter, the final piece to the industry's first complete end-to-end 100Gb/s InfiniBand interconnect solution. Doubling the throughput of the previous generation, the ConnectX-4 adapter delivers the consistent, high-performance and low latency required for high performance computing (HPC), cloud, Web 2.0 and enterprise applications to process and fulfill requests in real-time.

Mellanox's ConnectX®-4 Delivers EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand and 100Gb/s Ethernet Providing Superior Perfo ...

Mellanox's ConnectX®-4 Delivers EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand and 100Gb/s Ethernet Providing Superior Performance to HPC, Cloud, Web 2.0 and Enterprise Applications (Photo: Business Wire)

Mellanox's ConnectX-4 VPI adapter delivers 10, 20, 25, 40, 50, 56 and 100Gb/s throughput supporting both the InfiniBand and the Ethernet standard protocols, and the flexibility to connect any CPU architecture - x86, GPU, POWER, ARM (News - Alert), FPGA and more. With world-class performance at 150 million messages per second, latency of 0.7usec, and smart acceleration engines such as RDMA, GPUDirect and SR-IOV, ConnectX-4 will enable the most efficient compute and storage platforms.

"Large-scale clusters have incredibly high demands and require extremely low latency and high bandwidth," said Jorge Vinals, director at Minnesota Supercomputing Institute of the University of Minnesota. "Mellanox's ConnectX-4 will provide us with the node-to-node communication and real-time data retrieval capabilities we needed to make our EDR InfiniBand cluster the first of its kind in the U.S. With 100Gb/s capabilities, the EDR InfiniBand large-scale cluster will become a critical contribution to research at the University of Minnesota."

"IDC expects the use of 100Gb/s interconnects to begin ramping up in 2015," said Steve Conway, research vice president for high-performance computing at IDC. "Most HPC data centers need high bandwidth, low latency and strong overall interconnect performance to remain competitive in today's increasingly data-driven world. The introduction of 100Gb/s interconnects will help organizations keep up with the escalating demands for data retrieval and processing, and will enable unprecedented performance on mission-critical applications."

"Cloud infrastructures are becoming a more mainstream way of building compute and storage networks. More corporations and applications target the vast technological and financial improvements that utilization of the cloud offers," said Eyal Waldman, president and CEO of Mellanox. "With the exponential growth of data, the need for increased bandwidth and lower latency becomes a necessity to stay competitive. The same applies to the high-performance computing and the Web 2.0 markets. We have experienced the pull for 100Gb/s interconnects for over a year, and now with ConnectX-4, we will have a full end-to-end 100Gb/s interconnect that will provide the lowest latency, highest bandwidth and return-on-investment in the market."

ConnectX-4 adapters provide enterprises with a scalable, efficient and high-performance solution for cloud, Web 2.0, HPC and storage applications. The new adapter supports the new RoCE v2 (RDMA) specification, the full variety of overlay networks technologies - NVGRE (Network Virtualization using GRE), VXLAN (Virtual Extensible LAN), GENEVE (Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation), and MPLS (Multi-Protocol abel Switching), and storage offloads such as T10-DIF and RAID offload, and more.



ConnectX-4 adapters will begin sampling with select customers in Q1 2015. With ConnectX-4, Mellanox will offer a complete end-to-end 100Gb/s InfiniBand solution, including the EDR 100Gb/s Switch-IB™ InfiniBand switch and LinkX™ 100Gb/s copper and fiber cables. For Ethernet-based data centers, Mellanox's ConnectX-4 provides the complete link speed options of 10, 25, 40, 50 and 100Gb/s. Supporting these speeds, Mellanox offers a complete copper and fiber cable options. Leveraging Mellanox network adapters, cables and switches, users can ensure world-leading reliability, applications performance, and highest return-on-investment.

"For HPC and for Big Data, latency is a key contributor to application efficiency, and users pay more and more attention to time-to-solution," said Pascal Barbolosi, VP Extreme Computing at Bull. "Bull is ready to incorporate Mellanox's new end-to-end 100Gb/s interconnect solution in the bullx server ranges, to deliver ever more performance and continue to reduce latency."


"A basic requirement for Big Data applications in business and scientific computing today is to scale with the highest performance and efficiency," said Mike Vildibill, VP Product Management and Emerging Technologies, at DDN. "Mellanox's ConnectX-4 100Gb/s adapter gives our customers the power to scale mission critical applications in order to reduce application runtimes."

"A huge need for today's HPC compute-intensive applications is being able to scale with the highest performance and efficiency," said Ingolf Staerk, Senior Director Fujitsu (News - Alert) Global HPC office. "Mellanox's ConnectX-4 adapter will give our customers the power to scale at the speed of 100Gb/s and reduce their application runtime with PRIMERGY HPC solutions."

"Through the OpenPOWER Foundation, IBM (News - Alert) and Mellanox have been working closely together to drive much-needed innovation forward, particularly for the high performance computing space," said Brad McCredie, Vice President of IBM Power Development and OpenPOWER President. "Data demands have created an unbelievable amount of bottlenecks because networks have not been able to keep up. Mellanox's ConnectX-4 100Gb/s adapter combined with IBM Power Systems and all OpenPOWER compatible systems will meet the needs of today's and tomorrow's data demands."

"Mellanox's ConnectX-4 will make an immediate impact for our customers and for our business with the 100Gb/s interconnect performance," said Leijun Hu, VP of Inpsur Group. "Integrating the adapter into our next generation blade server system will allow us to have the flexibility and scalability we didn't have before to make our customer's infrastructure run as efficient and productive as possible."

"Interconnect performance capabilities are critical to compute-intensive applications which require ultra-low latency and a high rate of message communication in order to deliver faster results," said Bob Galush, Vice President Lenovo (News - Alert) System x. "Our systems today have been designed with Mellanox's ConnectX-4 100Gb/s capable adapters in mind and will easily and quickly integrate into our solution designs."

"Distributed memory systems have seen considerable growth over the past few years, increasing in both scale and complexity to serve a user base that prioritizes performance and efficiency," said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO of SGI. "Mellanox's ConnectX-4 will allow our customers to scale their systems at the speed of 100Gb/s, providing customers with a low latency network that drastically reduces application runtime and accelerates time to insight."

"Data demands have created an unbelievable amount of bottlenecks because networks have not been able to keep up," said Chaoqun Sha, VP of Technology at Sugon. "Mellanox's ConnectX-4 100Gb/s adapter will allow our new system TC5600 to meet the needs of today's and tomorrow's data demands."

"Supermicro's end-to-end Green Computing server, storage and networking solutions provide highly scalable, high performance, energy efficient server building blocks to support the most compute and data intensive supercomputing applications," said Tau Leng, Vice President of HPC at Supermicro. "Our collaborative efforts with Mellanox to integrate ConnectX-4 100Gb/s adapters across our extensive range of solutions advances HPC to the next level for Scientific and Research communities with increased flexibility, scalability, lower latency and higher bandwidth interconnectivity."

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About Mellanox

Mellanox Technologies is a leading supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage. Mellanox interconnect solutions increase data center efficiency by providing the highest throughput and lowest latency, delivering data faster to applications and unlocking system performance capability. Mellanox offers a choice of fast interconnect products: adapters, switches, software, cables and silicon that accelerate application runtime and maximize business results for a wide range of markets including high-performance computing, enterprise data centers, Web 2.0, cloud, storage and financial services. More information is available at http://www.mellanox.com/.

Mellanox, ConnectX, Virtual Protocol Interconnect are registered trademarks of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. LinkX and Switch-IB are trademarks of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.


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