25 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter Cards supporting RDMA, Overlay Networks Encapsulation/Decapsulation and more

ConnectX-4 Lx EN Network Controller with 10/25 Gb/s Ethernet connectivity addresses virtualized infrastructure challenges, delivering best-in-class and highest 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.

With the exponential increase in usage of data and the creation of new applications, the demand for the highest throughput, lowest latency, virtualization and sophisticated data acceleration engines continues to rise. ConnectX-4 Lx EN enables data centers to leverage the world's leading interconnect adapter for increasing their operational efficiency, improving servers' utilization, maximizing applications productivity, while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).

ConnectX-4 Lx EN provides an unmatched combination of 10/25Gb/s bandwidth, sub-microsecond latency and a 75 million packets per second message rate. It includes native hardware support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet, Ethernet stateless offload engines, Overlay Networks,and GPUDirect® Technology.

High Speed Ethernet Adapter

ConnectX-4 Lx offers the best cost effective Ethernet adapter solution for 10/25 Ethernet speeds, enabling seamless networking, clustering, or storage. The adapter reduces application runtime, and offers the flexibility and scalability to make infrastructure run as efficiently and productively as possible.

I/O Virtualization

ConnectX-4 Lx EN 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 Lx EN 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 EN effectively addresses this by providing advanced NVGRE, VXLAN and GENEVE hardware offloading engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay protocol headers, enabling the traditional offloads to be performed on the encapsulated traffic for these and other tunneling protocols (GENEVE, MPLS, QinQ, and so on). With ConnectX-4 Lx EN, data center operators can achieve native performance in the new network architecture.

RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)

ConnectX-4 Lx EN supports RoCE specifications delivering low-latency and high- performance over Ethernet networks. Leveraging data center bridging (DCB) capabilities as well as ConnectX-4 Lx EN 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 (for example, from GPU to CPU), and therefore significantly reduces application run time. ConnectX-4 Lx EN advanced acceleration technology enables higher cluster efficiency and scalability to tens of thousands of nodes