ConnectX-4 from Mellanox is a family of high-performance and low-latency Ethernet and InfiniBand adapters. The ConnectX-4 Lx EN adapters are available in 40 Gb and 25 Gb Ethernet speeds and the ConnectX-4 Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) adapter supports 100 Gb EDR InfiniBand and 100 Gb Ethernet.These adapters address virtualized infrastructure challenges, delivering best-in-class performance to various demanding markets and applications. Providing true hardware-based I/O isolation with unmatched scalability and efficiency, achieving the most cost-effective and flexible solution for Web 2.0, Cloud, data analytics, database, and storage platforms.
ConnectX-4 100 Gb Ethernet/EDR InfiniBand
ConnectX-4 with Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) offers the highest throughput VPI adapter, supporting EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand and 100Gb/s Ethernet and enabling any standard networking, clustering, or storage to operate seamlessly over any converged network leveraging a consolidated software stack.
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 and VXLAN. 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 Lx effectively addresses this by providing advanced NVGRE and VXLAN hardware offloading engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay protocol header as well as offloads TCP stateless activities on the encapsulated packet.
RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)
ConnectX-4 adapters supports RoCE specifications delivering low-latency and high-performance over Ethernet networks. The ConnectX-4 VPI adapter also supports IBTA RDMA (Remote Data Memory Access) for InfiniBand network performance. Leveraging data center bridging (DCB) capabilities as well as ConnectX-4 advanced congestion control hardware mechanisms, RoCE provides efficient low-latency RDMA services over Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks.
Mellanox PeerDirect
PeerDirect communication provides high efficiency RDMA access by eliminating unnecessary internal data copies between components on the PCIe bus, and therefore significantly reduces application run time. ConnectX-4 advanced acceleration technology enables higher cluster efficiency and scalability to tens of thousands of nodes.
