New Mellanox Adapter Supports Ethernet, InfiniBand

Mellanox (News - Alert) Technologies, which sells products that connect servers and/or storage in the data center, this quarter will make generally available its ConnectX-3 adapter technology. John Monson, vice president of product marketing, says that the product is unique because it can enable connections via 10 and 40 gigabit Ethernet technology, FDR 56gpbs InfiniBand, or a combination of the two.

It features a next-generation PCI (News - Alert) Express 3.0 host bus and allows for virtualization. ConnectX-3 also supports remote direct memory access, which means that instead of the CPU having to move all the data, the application can see all the data directly – and that significantly reduces application latency and the amount of CPU required to execute, Monson explains.

The product is sampling now. Acceleration software for ConnectX-3 is in the pipeline.

“Mellanox continues to increase its performance-leadership position, developing the industry’s best performance-based adapter solutions with integrated I/O technology to meet the flexibility and power efficiency needs of today’s multi-core server and storage systems,” says Eyal Waldman, chairman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. “Utilizing PCIe Gen 3, ConnectX-3 delivers the world’s highest performance and lowest latency on either InfiniBand or Ethernet, with breakthrough application acceleration that delivers maximum efficiency for improved performance, reduced infrastructure costs and lowest power. With its low power, high-performance, and low cost per Gb/s bandwidth, ConnectX-3 is tailored to meet the demands of Web 2.0 applications where we believe it will be widely used.”

Mellanox builds everything from the silicon to systems, and its primary customers are the major server companies, including Dell, HP, IBM and Oracle (News - Alert) (which has a 10 percent investment in the company), Monson says. A 10-year-old, public company, Mellanox is growing 20 to 30 percent per year.

“We deliver efficiency to the compute and storage elements,” says Monson, adding that the interconnect is resolving bottlenecks that previously were holding back new efficiencies and cost savings.

The company earlier this month announced record revenue of $63.3 million for its fiscal second quarter 2011, ended June 30, 2011.

“Reaching the quarter-billion dollar annualized revenue run rate is a significant milestone for Mellanox,” Waldman says. “We completed the successful integration of Voltaire (News - Alert) into Mellanox, and during the quarter we introduced our end-to-end FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand and 40 Gigabit Ethernet interconnect solutions. We are encouraged by the momentum of design-wins and traction we see in various vertical markets and applications for these solutions.”

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