Mellanox: Reconstructing the network world with data at the center

Not long ago, as a leading provider of end-to-end interconnect solutions for high-performance computing and data centers, Mellanox (Chinese name: 麦洛思) held a "云启AI" Mellanox high-speed Ethernet communication meeting in Beijing. At the meeting, Mellanox officially launched Spectrum-2, a 200G and 400G open Ethernet switch solution with the world's highest scalability.

Data empowerment, smart network first

It is understood that Spectrum-2 has set a new record for data center scalability, which is more than 10 times higher than mainstream products on the market, and the energy efficiency can reach 1.3 times, thereby reducing the operating costs of data centers. In addition, Spectrum-2's programmability has also reached a new level, and the routing function has been optimized, all of which are building the most efficient computing and storage infrastructure based on Ethernet.

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Liu Tong, senior director of market development for Asia Pacific and China at Mellanox, introduced the background of the birth of Spectrum-2 to reporters. He told reporters that people are surrounded by more and more data, applications, and connected devices. Data is gradually growing exponentially around the world, and people need higher data transmission speeds, stronger data processing capabilities, and better data security.

"Data growth is a very good growth opportunity for Mellanox." Liu Tong said that from network cards, chips, switches, to network cables, transceivers, and optical modules, Mellanox can provide a comprehensive end-to-end solution for network interconnection in the big data era to meet faster transmission speeds and stronger data processing capabilities. There is almost no company on the market that can develop all chips in-house like Mellanox, and then manufacture all computing, storage, and network equipment to provide end-to-end network solutions to customers. "In the future, whether users need 10G, 25G, 40G, 50G, 100G, 200G or even 400G, Mellanox is the only company that can provide all these network rates, the only company that can provide so many end-to-end network rates, and the only company that can focus on intelligent network equipment, including both intelligent network cards and intelligent switches, as well as intelligent chip SOC devices."

Subverting the traditional CPU-centric architecture of data centers

Liu Tong revealed that Mellanox has won the recognition of many customers in the field of data centers. Five of the top six banks in the world use Mellanox high-speed networks to support financial back-end data centers. Nine of the top ten hyperscale companies in the world all use Mellanox solutions. Liu Tong emphasized that it is not a certain business department that is using Mellanox products, but millions of data centers in these "giant" companies are using Mellanox. In addition, some data can also prove the strength of Mellanox: nine of the top ten oil companies in the world, three of the top five pharmaceutical companies in the world, and even the top ten automobile companies in the world are using Mellanox solutions.

The reporter found that these companies have one thing in common: they generate a large amount of data, and the rapid growth of their business requires a more advanced data center architecture to process more data. Why did they choose Mellanox? Liu Tong said that Mellanox believes that the traditional CPU-centric data center is shifting to a data-centric data center architecture. In the past, data centers had a single task and processed a small amount of data, so the CPU-centric architecture could meet business needs. But today people are facing rapidly growing business types and data volumes, and the traditional CPU-centric architecture cannot be broken through, and its efficiency is greatly limited. "This is exactly why world-renowned companies choose Mellanox, because they need to transform their data centers. They can no longer consider the architecture of their data centers with the CPU as the core, but must be data-centric. Because we need to analyze data to generate value, only data-centricity is IT, and it is the core that people in the data center should consider."

Reconstructing the data center with data as the center

"If we follow the traditional data center rules, all nodes need to wait in line for the CPU to process data before they can start analyzing the data, which is bound to create a bottleneck." Mellanox found through analysis that only flowing data can generate value. It is transferred from one place to another, shared by everyone, and analyzed to generate value. Mellanox believes that the network plays a vital role in this, so it proposed a new concept - In-Network computing, which makes the network a data processing unit, and all data-related calculations are completed within the network.

Through network cloud computing, that is, through some devices in the network, including network cards and switches, to complete some data calculations, Mellanox has observed that application latency has dropped to one-tenth, from the original 30 microseconds to 3 microseconds. "This is a new data center architecture transmission method and also one of the core technologies of Mellanox."

Liu Tong gave an example, Mellanox uses a new network transmission protocol RDMA on the data center smart network card instead of the traditional TCP, because RDMA will save more CPU resources and make data transmission more efficient. Its transmission method is very simple, there is no red CPU to intervene, and data transmission is from application cache to application cache, bypassing many unnecessary links, thus making communication and data transmission faster, so the application processing speed will also be faster.

The reporter also learned that Mellanox's solutions have been recognized by many companies in China. Baidu, Alibaba, and Kingsoft Cloud are all loyal customers of Mellanox. In the future, Mellanox will continue to reconstruct data-centric innovative data centers to create more data value for more corporate customers.