Mellanox Adapters Supply Dell Blade Servers with Clustering, Networking I/O Features

Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of connectivity solutions for data center servers and storage systems, announced that its ConnectX-2 I/O mezzanine adapter card with virtual protocol interconnect technology and PhyX PHY technology used in the Dell (News - Alert) 10 GbE Pass Through II module are now available through Dell for the PowerEdge M1000e Dell Chassis and M-Series Blade Servers.

According to Mellanox (News - Alert), the ConnectX-2 mezzanine cards can be used in conjunction with Dell's 10Gb Ethernet Pass Through II module or the Mellanox InfiniScale IV InfiniBand-based M3601Q blade switch, which provides flexibility for data centers, enabling the M-Series servers to attach to InfiniBand and/or 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks via a single mezzanine card.

"The demands on data center I/O connectivity continue to increase with the deployment of many-core CPUs, virtualization, networked storage, clustered databases, and low-latency applications in financial services, cloud computing, Web 2.0, and the commercial high-performance computing sector," said John Monson, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "The combination of Mellanox's InfiniBand and Ethernet connectivity products and Dell blade servers provides a simplified solution that meets next-generation data center and cluster performance and flexibility requirements, while reducing capital expense and networking complexity."

"Dell's blade servers help reduce data center capital expenses while providing IT and cluster administrators with greater bandwidth performance, better CPU utilization, and more efficient use of their data center space," said Brian Payne, director of server product management at Dell. "Partnering with Mellanox enables Dell to provide server and storage I/O performance with flexibility to support the myriad of communication protocols and network fabrics over a single device, without sacrificing functionality when consolidating I/O."

Mellanox ConnectX-2 VPI cards utilizing either InfiniBand or 10 Gigabit Ethernet with its software suite are suited to a variety of business and clustering applications. VPI cards auto-sense the switch fabric and will configure its ports to support InfiniBand or Ethernet automatically. ConnectX-2 40Gb/s InfiniBand with its 1us application latency enables high server productivity and supports application and communication offloads with CORE-Direct and GPU efficiency enhancements via Nvidia GPUDirect.

ConnectX-2 10 Gigabit Ethernet with support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) delivers Ethernet's lowest latency of 1.3us. FlexBoot enables servers to boot from remote InfiniBand or LAN storage targets and makes it easier for IT managers to deploy infrastructure that meets the challenges of a dynamic data center. ConnectX-2 with virtual intelligent queuing (Virtual-IQ) technology provides adapter resources and isolation and protection for virtual machines (VM) within the server. I/O virtualization provides better server utilization and LAN and SAN unification.

The Dell 10 Gigabit Ethernet Pass Through II module, utilizing Mellanox PhyX PHY devices, supports 10GBASE-KX4 across the M1000e chassis mid-plane. Each of the 16 SFP+ ports provides direct low-latency access to each server blade. The pass through module is an economical low power solution for connecting the PowerEdge M1000e to larger 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabrics.

Mellanox ConnectX-2 VPI mezzanine adapter cards and Dell 10 Gigabit Ethernet Pass Through II modules are available now through Dell, the company noted in a release.

In related news, Mellanox Technologies partnered with Dell to deploy its ConnectX- 2 I/O mezzanine adapter card with virtual protocol interconnect (VPI) technology and PhyX PHY technology within the Dell 10G Ethernet Pass through II module for the PowerEdge M1000e Dell Chassis and M-Series Blade Servers. When used in conjunction with Dell's 10G Ethernet Pass Through II module or the Mellanox InfiniScale IV InfiniBand-based M3601Q blade switch, the ConnectX-2 mezzanine cards provides added flexibility for data centers since the M-Series servers can attach to InfiniBand and/or 10G Ethernet networks via a single mezzanine card.