Mellanox Launches Innovative ConnectX-6 Dx Chip, BlueField-2 Secure Cloud SmartNIC and I/O Processing Unit Solutions

Beijing, China – September 3, 2019 – Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ: MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end intelligent interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2, a new generation of cloud SmartNIC and I/O processing unit (IPU) solutions designed to achieve data center security, performance and efficiency when processing a variety of workloads at scale. Based on Mellanox's innovative high-performance cloud networking foundation, ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 introduce hardware acceleration engines and software programming capabilities in key applications, making the impossible possible. Not only does it improve the security and efficiency of hyperscale data centers, enterprises, and telecommunications environments, it also enables them to achieve very high return on investment (ROI).

ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNIC provides up to two 25, 50 or 100Gb/s ports or a single 200Gb/s port, and its Ethernet card uses 50Gb/s PAM4 SerDes technology and connects to the host via PCIe 4.0. ConnectX-6 Dx's innovative hardware offload engine supports IPsec and online TLS dynamic data encryption, advanced network virtualization, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage acceleration, etc.

The BlueField-2 IPU integrates all the advanced features of ConnectX-6 Dx on a System-on-Chip (SoC), a powerful Arm processor array, high-performance memory interfaces, and a variety of flexible processing functions, supporting Ethernet and InfiniBand interfaces up to 200Gb/s. Embedded controllers based on BlueField-2 are ideal for building cost-effective flash, security, IoT, and edge computing platforms. The BlueField-2 SmartNIC acts as a coprocessor, connecting another computer in front of the computer, and uses advanced software-defined network technology, NVMe SNAP storage disaggregation technology, and enhanced security features to achieve conversion between bare metal environments and virtualized environments. In addition, BlueField-2 achieves very good performance and efficiency when running AI applications on the cloud or at the edge of the network.

“We are excited to introduce ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 architectures, creating a revolutionary acceleration engine for the next generation cloud data center,” said Yael Shenhav, vice president of Ethernet NIC and SoC at Mellanox. “Building on the award-winning ConnectX and BlueField product families, ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 set a new record in high-performance networking, helping our customers and partners build more secure and efficient compute and storage infrastructures to increase productivity and reduce total cost of ownership.”

"As cloud computing becomes more popular, enterprises are increasingly relying on the underlying data center infrastructure to support application switching between public cloud, private cloud and edge," said Baron Fung, director of Dell'Oro Group. "As a result, the market needs more advanced, more secure and high-performance SmartNICs. Based on this, we predict that the SmartNIC market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 40% and the total market value will exceed US$500 million by 2023."

Making cloud and data storage more secure

ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 can provide protection for every data center server, storage and edge computing endpoint, and are designed to meet the huge cloud security challenges. ConnectX-6 Dx is security-centric and has launched a large number of innovative technologies, including IPsec, TLS and AES-XTS built-in encryption acceleration, hardware trust root, etc. In addition to the above functions, BlueField-2 also adds accelerated key management, integrated regular expression (RegEx) pattern detection, secure HASH calculation and other functions.

Efficient, scalable bare metal and virtualized cloud

ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 offer the latest generation of Mellanox ASAP2– Accelerated Switch and Packet Processing® technology with built-in SR-IOV, Open vSwitch (OVS) and VirtIO hardware accelerators. ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 also feature network virtualization offload technology, enhanced programmability and scalability to help build efficient hyperscale cloud and SDN/NFV data centers while enabling a smooth transition from previous generations of ConnectX and BlueField.

Accelerating Storage, Big Data, and AI with RDMA

ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 provide RDMA performance for Ethernet and InfiniBand networks with enhanced programmability and robustness, accelerating the most demanding hyperscale applications. Further innovations in advanced traffic management technology allow RoCE to run seamlessly on ordinary networks, making it an ideal enterprise-class, easy-to-use network transport technology.

Industry Recognition:

Liu Ning, director of Baidu's system department, pointed out, "Baidu has made great progress in the field of AI cloud. Our services can be provided as fast as users think." "Therefore, we have cooperated with Mellanox, a leader in high-performance networks, to use its high-speed connection solutions for Baidu's machine learning platform. We expect Mellanox's programmable, cloud-oriented SmartNICs and IPUs to provide better network performance and accelerate the operation of scalable AI-based applications."

“IBM enterprise server solutions are designed to deliver exceptional performance for the most demanding applications, while providing unmatched security and reliability,” said Monica Aggarwal, vice president of IBM Cognitive Systems Development. “We look forward to integrating the new Mellanox SmartNIC family into our offerings to enable efficient and secure cloud data centers.”

“Through our collaboration with Mellanox, F5’s ConnectX SmartNIC family of application services can now natively support traffic optimization services, CGNAT, and DNS, addressing multiple VNF challenges faced by our mutual customers,” said James Feger, vice president and general manager of service delivery at F5 Networks.

The offload capabilities of Mellanox ConnectX-5 not only doubled the performance of DNS QPS, but also significantly improved the scale and performance of security workloads. We look forward to the new Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx to help our customers continue to expand their infrastructure and even improve operational efficiency.”

“We work closely with Mellanox in the areas of HPC and AI to advance Lenovo’s strategy of ‘From Exascale to Everyscale™’, ensuring that customers of all computing sizes can use exascale computing technologies,” said Scott Tease, Executive Director of HPC and AI at Lenovo Data Center Group.

“The new Mellanox SmartNIC and IPU portfolio will help achieve the goal of computing at all scales, from exascale to all scales, providing secure, efficient and high-speed connectivity solutions to create a data-centric future.”

“Meituan leverages machine learning and AI algorithms at scale to provide a full range of e-commerce services. With the end-to-end Mellanox technology in place, application performance is exceptional and data is being transformed into tangible value as our customer base continues to grow,” said Michael Zhu, Vice President of Infrastructure Technology at Meituan, a leading service e-commerce platform in China. “We are excited that the new secure cloud SmartNIC and IPU product families from Mellanox can further accelerate scalable AI applications.”

"The combination of the Nokia Nuage Networks Virtual Cloud Services (VCS) solution and the Mellanox ConnectX SmartNIC family will enable the next level of performance for telco cloud deployments," said Saurabh Sandhir, head of product management at Nuage Networks. "As telco cloud customers continue to evolve their Network Function Virtualization (NFV) networks, this innovative integrated solution will be forward compatible with the next generation of Mellanox SmartNICs, even further improving performance. In addition, both the Nuage Networks telco cloud portfolio and customers will benefit from the advanced security and virtualization offload technologies of the Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 SmartNICs."

“Whether it’s for self-driving cars or other machine learning training, deep neural network-based AI requires massive amounts of network bandwidth and RDMA to enable high-speed communication between GPUs and storage, which is why NVIDIA DGX AI servers and DRIVE Constellation driving simulation solutions use Mellanox InfiniBand and Ethernet networking,” said Charlie Boyle, vice president and general manager of DGX Systems at NVIDIA. “We look forward to the new networking, security and storage capabilities of Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2, which will significantly accelerate training and inference workloads in the data center and at the edge.”

“As we continue to deliver an open and flexible hybrid cloud infrastructure to enterprises around the world, a key requirement is to more securely and efficiently provision and deploy workloads across bare metal, virtualized, private and public cloud environments,” said Chris Wright, senior vice president and CTO of Red Hat. “To meet this requirement, enterprises also want to unlock the value of their data at a lower cost, and hardware acceleration plays a critical role in processing performance-sensitive applications and facilitating deeper insights, such as AI/ML applications, from the edge to the data center. We look forward to collaborating with Mellanox to develop open source software solutions that can leverage these new technologies.”

“Ubuntu has always been at the forefront of large-scale cloud infrastructure deployments,” said Stephan Fabel, Product Director at Canonical. “The new Mellanox SmartNIC family is well suited to deliver advanced offload technologies and new capabilities for a broad range of use cases, combined with the scalability of the Ubuntu ecosystem to provide a better management experience in the data center. We are proud to work with Mellanox to bring BlueField-2 IPU-based SmartNICs to Ubuntu.”

“Ucloud provides a wide range of cloud computing services through its global data center infrastructure. By deploying Mellanox SmartNICs across our cloud data centers, we are able to meet the growing and predictable performance requirements,” said Leo Xu, Director of UCloud Networking. “We are excited to introduce software-defined networking and storage disaggregation to our bare metal cloud environment with the new Mellanox programmable IPU technology.”

About Mellanox

Mellanox, whose full English name is Mellanox Technologies (Chinese name: Mellanox), is a leading company that provides end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions for servers and storage worldwide.

Mellanox interconnect solutions can greatly improve data center efficiency through low latency and high throughput, quickly transfer data between applications and systems, and improve system availability. Mellanox provides the industry with technologies and products that accelerate the interconnection of internal devices, including network cards, switches, software and chips. These products can accelerate application execution and improve the efficiency of HPC, enterprise data centers, Web2.0, cloud computing, storage and financial services. For more information, please visit: www.mellanox.com.