Ethernet Cards - Overview

Mellanox 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet Converged Network Adapters

Mellanox continues its leadership in providing high-performance networking technologies by delivering superior utilization and scaling in ConnectX®-2 EN 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet Adapters, enabling data centers to do more with less.

Mellanox ConnectX®-2 EN Ethernet Network Interface Cards (NIC)

deliver the industry's lowest 1.3 us latency performance with performance-leading 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity with stateless offloads for converged fabrics in Enterprise Data Centers, High-Performance Computing, and Embedded environments. Clustered databases, web infrastructure, and IP video servers are just a few example applications that will achieve significant throughput and latency improvements resulting in faster access, real-time response and increased number of users per server. ConnectX-2 EN improves network performance by increasing available bandwidth to the CPU and providing enhanced performance, especially in virtualized server environments.

Optimal Price/Performance

ConnectX-2 EN 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet removes I/O bottlenecks in mainstream servers that are limiting application performance. Servers supporting PCI Express 2.0 with 5GT/s will be able to fully utilize both 10Gb/s ports, while the 40GigE port will fully saturate the host bus, delivering the I/O bandwidth required by these high-end servers. Hardware-based stateless offload engines handle the TCP/UDP/IP segmentation, reassembly, and checksum calculations that would otherwise burden the host process. These offload technologies are fully compatible with Microsoft RSS and NetDMA. Total cost of ownership is optimized by maintaining an end-to-end Ethernet network on existing operating systems and applications.

Mellanox provides 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet adapters suitable for all network environments. The dual port SFP+ adapter supports 10GBASE-SR, -LR, and direct attached copper cable providing the flexibility to connect over short, medium, and long distances. Dual port 10GBASE-T adapters provide easy connections up to 100m over familiar UTP wiring. The dual port 10GBASE-CX4 and single port 40GBASE-CR4 adapters with their powered connectors can utilize active copper and fiber cables as well as passive copper.

Converged Ethernet

ConnectX-2 EN delivers the features needed for a converged network with support for Data Center Bridging (DCB). Fibre Channel frame encapsulation compliant with T11 and hardware offloads simplifies FCoE deployment while efficient RDMA transactions are enabled by Low Latency Ethernet running over DCB fabrics. By maintaining link-level interoperability with existing Ethernet networks, IT managers can leverage existing data center fabric management solutions.

I/O Virtualization

ConnectX-2 EN support for hardware-based I/O virtualization provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VM) within the server. ConnectX-2 EN gives data center managers better server utilization and LAN and SAN unification while reducing cost, power, and cable complexity.

Quality of Service

Resource allocation per application or per VM is provided and protected by the advanced QoS supported by ConnectX-2 EN. Service levels for multiple traffic types can be based on IETF DiffServ or IEEE 802.1p/Q, along with the DCB enhancements, allowing system administrators to prioritize traffic by application, virtual machine, or protocol. This powerful combination of QoS and prioritization provides the ultimate fine-grain control of traffic – ensuring that applications run smoothly in today’s complex environment.

Software Support

ConnectX-2 EN is supported by a full suite of software drivers for Microsoft Windows, Linux distributions, VMware and Citrix XenServer. ConnectX-2 EN supports stateless offload and is fully interoperable with standard TCP/UDP/IP stacks. ConnectX-2 EN supports various management interfaces and has a rich set of configuring and management tools across operating systems.

*All Card Types Listed use RoHS and Host Bus PCIe 2.0

*Features Include Stateless Offload, FCoE Offload, Priority Flow Control, SR-IOV

*OS Support : RHEL, SLES, W2K3, W2K8, FreeBSD, VMware ESX4.0