TMCnet News

Mellanox Boosts DPDK Performance for NFV and Cloud
[March 02, 2015]

Mellanox Boosts DPDK Performance for NFV and Cloud


Mellanox (News - Alert)® Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ:MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions, today announced the ConnectX®-4 100Gb/s Ethernet NIC (News - Alert) achieves as much as 75 million packets per second packet handling capabilities. This I/O packet performance breakthrough will drive adoption of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) in both service provider networks and enterprise cloud deployments.

The new ConnectX-4 100Gb/s Ethernet NIC delivers line rate performance of over 90Gb/s throughput and as much as 75 million raw packet per second handling rate which represents a huge step forward in making NFV a reality for production deployment. The ConnectedX-4 NIC flexibly supports 10, 25, 40, 50 and 100GbE interfaces and supports advanced capabilities including RoCE, overlay network acceleration (VXLAN, NVGRE, and GENEVE), embedded virtual switch, and DPDK acceleration. The fully tuned performance results over DPDK for the ConnectX-4 NIC will be published when the poll mode driver is planned to be available in the second quarter.

The ConnectX family of Ethernet NICs overcomes critical NFV throughput, packet handling, and latency performance limitations and thus allows customers to move from proof of concept to production deployments. With unmatched Ethernet throughput and packet handling performance, ConnectX-4 overcomes the perception that specialized hardware appliances deliver higher performance than server based solutions.

In addition, the SwitchX®-2 based family of 10, 40, and 56Gb/s Ethernet switches offer full line rate switching capabilities at all packet sizes. This zero packet loss forwarding capability stands in stark contrast to other switches, which lose packets even with a typical mix of small and large packets. The Mellanox Ethernet switches deliver low-latency cut through switching with deterministic latency of ~220ns for all configurations. Other switch offerings are unable to achieve this level of performance and depending on the packet size and number of ports used, have store and forward latencies as much as 96 percent worse than SwitchX-2.

This combination of exceptional NIC packet handling and throughput capabilities with unmatched zero packet loss, low-latency switch forwarding is critical for overall NFV performance. This unique set of performance capabilities makes the Mellanox Ethernet technology portfolio the ideal networking infrastructure solution for NFV platforms.

"Mellanox, through our cutting-edge NIC and switch technologies, and joint innovation with our partners, eliminates the performance barrier associated with deploying NFV solutions," said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "Moreover, these groundbreaking performance numbers are achieved without sacrificing valuable server resources. The intelligence and parallel flow processing capabilities of our ConnectX family of thernet Adapters imposes minimal burden on precious CPU and memory resources, empowering NFV platforms to do what they are supposed to do: service and application processing, rather than handling packet I/O."



"In a production-ready NFV solution, a high-performance, low-latency and high-density NFV infrastructure layer is essential to both guaranteed experience for end users and highest efficiency for communication service providers (CSPs). As a founding member of the HP OpenNFV Program, Mellanox brings unique and cutting-edge Network Equipment-Building System (NEBS) certified technologies into the ecosystem to achieve just that," said Werner Schaefer (News - Alert), vice president, Network Functions Virtualization, HP. "Mellanox high performance networking solutions enables us to deliver innovative designs that help CSPs achieve new levels of scalability, reliability and efficiency as they deploy, manage, and operate services in a virtualized cloud environment."

"ConteXtream's Carrier-SDN fabric has already been in production at several Tier-1 operators across the globe, enabling them to leverage standard, low-cost server hardware and hypervisors to virtualize functions and services, while replacing costly purpose-built proprietary systems. That is why we truly understand the unique value that Mellanox brings to the table to enhance the performance and efficiency of commercial off-the-shelf infrastructures, and include their solutions in our deployments," said Ariel Noy, CTO, ConteXtream. "The impact of the ConteXtream and Mellanox joint solution on the economics of running carrier core network and service infrastructure makes virtualization an obvious choice."


Supporting Resources:

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, SwitchX, and Virtual Protocol Interconnect are registered trademarks of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.


[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]