Manufacturer: Mellanox Technologies Ltd
Manufacturer Part Number: MCX614106A-VCAT
Manufacturer Website Address: http://www.mellanox.com
Brand Name: Mellanox
Product Line: ConnectX-6 EN
Product Name: 200GbE Ethernet Adapter Card
Marketing Information: World’s first 200GbE Ethernet network interface card, enabling industry-leading performance smart offloads and in-network computing for Cloud, Web 2.0, Big Data, Storage and Machine Learning applications
ConnectX-6 EN provides up to two ports of 200GbE connectivity, sub 0.8usec latency and 215 million messages per second, enabling the highest performance and most flexible solution for the most demanding data center applications.
ConnectX-6 is a groundbreaking addition to the Mellanox ConnectX series of industry-leading adapter cards. In addition to all the existing innovative features of past versions, ConnectX-6 offers a number of enhancements to further improve performance and scalability, such as support for 200/100/50/40/25/10/1 GbE Ethernet speeds and PCIe Gen 4.0. Moreover, ConnectX-6 Ethernet cards can connect up to 32-lanes of PCIe to achieve 200Gb/s of bandwidth, even on Gen 3.0 PCIe systems.
Cloud and Web 2.0 Environments
Telco, Cloud and Web 2.0 customers developing their platforms on Software Defined Network (SDN) environments are leveraging the Virtual Switching capabilities of the Operating Systems on their servers to enable maximum flexibility in the management and routing protocols of their networks.
Open vSwitch (OVS) is an example of a virtual switch that allows Virtual Machines to communicate among themselves and with the outside world. Software-based virtual switches, traditionally residing in the hypervisor, are CPU intensive, affecting system performance and preventing full utilization of available CPU for compute functions.
To address this, ConnectX-6 offers ASAP – Mellanox Accelerated Switch and Packet Processing® technology to offload the vSwitch/vRouter by handling the data plane in the NIC hardware while maintaining the control plane unmodified. As a result, significantly higher vSwitch/vRouter performance is achieved without the associated CPU load.
The vSwitch/vRouter offload functions supported by ConnectX-5 and ConnectX-6 include encapsulation and de-capsulation of overlay network headers, as well as stateless offloads of inner packets, packet headers re-write (enabling NAT functionality), hairpin, and more.
In addition, ConnectX-6 offers intelligent flexible pipeline capabilities, including programmable flexible parser and flexible match-action tables, which enable hardware offloads for future protocols.
Storage Environments
NVMe storage devices are gaining momentum, offering very fast access to storage media. The evolving NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) protocol leverages RDMA connectivity to remotely access NVMe storage devices efficiently, while keeping the end-to-end NVMe model at lowest latency. With its NVMe-oF target and initiator offloads, ConnectX-6 brings further optimization to NVMe-oF, enhancing CPU utilization and scalability.
Security
ConnectX-6 block-level encryption offers a critical innovation to network security. As data in transit is stored or retrieved, it undergoes encryption and decryption. The ConnectX-6 hardware offloads the IEEE AES-XTS encryption/decryption from the CPU, saving latency and CPU utilization. It also guarantees protection for users sharing the same resources through the use of dedicated encryption keys.
Product Type: 200Gigabit Ethernet Card
Interfaces/Ports
Host Interface: PCI Express 3.0 x16
Total Number of Ports: 2
I/O Expansions
Expansion Slot Type: QSFP56
Media & Performance
Media Type Supported: Optical Fiber
Network & Communication
Network Technology: 100GBase-X
Physical Characteristics
Form Factor: Plug-in Card
Miscellaneous
Package Contents:
- 200GbE Ethernet Adapter Card
- 1 x Short Bracket
Device Supported: Server
Environmentally Friendly: Yes
Environmental Certification: RoHS
Warranty
Limited Warranty: 1 Year