VMworld: Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 Cloud SmartNICs and I/O Processing Unit Solutions

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. introduced ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 – next-gen cloud SmartNICs and I/O Processing Unit (IPU) solutions, delivering data center security, performance and efficiency at massive scale, for any workload.

ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 introduced hardware acceleration engines and software programmability to mission-critical applications. They deliver new levels of security and efficiency with thigh ROI for hyperscale, enterprise, and telco environments.

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ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNICs provide up to 2 ports of 25, 50 or 100Gb/s, or a single port of 200Gb/s, Ethernet connectivity powered by 50Gb PAM4 SerDes technology and PCIe 4.0 host connectivity. The ConnectX-6 Dx hardware offload engines include IPsec and TLS inline data-in-motion crypto, advanced network virtualization, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), and NVMe-oF storage accelerations.

The BlueField-2 IPU integrates all the capabilities of ConnectX-6 Dx with an array of ARM processor cores, performance memory interfaces, and flexible processing capabilities in a single SoC, supporting Ethernet and IB connectivity up to 200Gb/s.

It based embedded controllers are for building efficient and cost-effective flash storage, security, IoT and edge computing platforms. BlueField-2 based SmartNICs act as a co-processor that puts a computer in front of the computer to transform bare-metal and virtualized environments using software-defined networking, NVMe SNAP storage disaggregation, and enhanced security capabilities. Furthermore, it delivers performance and efficiency for AI workloads in the cloud or at the network edge.

“We are excited to introduce the ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 architectures, providing groundbreaking acceleration engines for next-generation cloud data-centers,” said Yael Shenhav, VP, business Ethernet NIC and IPU business. “Built on the success of our award-winning ConnectX and BlueField product families, ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 set new records in high-performance networking, allowing our customers and partners to build highly secure and efficient compute and storage infrastructures to increase productivity and reduce TCO.“

“With cloud computing becoming the norm, enterprises increasingly rely on the underlying data-center infrastructures to deploy workloads across public, private and edge domains“, said Baron Fung, director, Dell’Oro Group. “Hence, there is a growing need for advanced, secure, high performance SmartNICs. This is one of the reasons why we forecast the SmartNIC market to grow at a 40% CAGR surpassing $500 million by 2023.“

Secure cloud and storage
ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 are positioned to address the cloud security challenges by delivering protection at every data center server, storage, and edge computing endpoint. ConnectX-6 Dx provides a range of security-centered innovations, including IPsec, TLS, and AES-XTS built-in cryptographic acceleration, and Hardware Root of Trust. In addition to the above capabilities, BlueField-2 adds accelerated key management, integrated Regular Expression (RegEx) pattern detection, secure hash computation, and more.

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Scalable Bare Metal and virtualized clouds
ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 deliver the latest gen of the company’s ASAP2 – Accelerated Switch and Packet Processing technology – with built-in SR-IOV, Open vSwitch (OVS), and VirtIO hardware accelerators. Introducing additional network virtualization offloads, enhanced programmability and extreme scale, They enable efficient hyperscale cloud and SDN/NFV data-centers, with a smooth transition from previous ConnectX and BlueField generations

Accelerate storage, big data and AI with RDMA
They provide RDMA performance over Ethernet and IB with enhanced programmability and robustness, for accelerating the demanding workloads at extreme scale. Traffic management innovations enable communications to run over ordinary networks, making RoCE the enterprise-grade, easy-to-use, network transport technology of choice.

“Deep neural network-based AI for autonomous vehicles and other ML training requires massive amounts of networking bandwidth and RDMA to connect the GPU systems to each other and to storage, which is why NVIDIA DGX AI servers and DRIVE Constellation driving simulation solutions take advantage of Mellanox IB and Ethernet networking connectivity,” said Charlie Boyle, VP and GM, DGX systems, NVIDIA Corp. “We look forward to the new networking, security, and storage capabilities in the Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2, which we expect will greatly accelerate training and inference workloads in the data center and at the edge.“

“As we work to deliver flexible and open hybrid cloud infrastructure to enterprises around the world, the ability to more securely and efficiently provision and deploy workloads across bare-metal, virtual and private and public cloud environments become a critical need,” said Chris Wright, SVP and CTO, Red Hat, Inc. “This need pairs with enterprises wanting to derive value from data at a reduced cost, with hardware acceleration playing an important role for the performance-sensitive workloads driving these insights, like AI/ML, as they are deployed from the edge to the datacenter. We look forward to collaborating with Mellanox to enable open source software solutions that can take advantage of these new technologies.“

“Our partnership with Mellanox in high-performance computing (HPC) and AI is a key pillar of the Lenovo ‘From Exascale to Everyscale’ strategy to make the technologies of Exascale computing accessible to customers of all sizes” said Scott Tease, executive director, high-performance computing and AI, Lenovo Data Center Group. “The new Mellanox portfolios of SmartNICs and IPUs will help to make ‘Exascale to Everyscale’ a reality, delivering secure, efficient, high-speed connectivity for the data centric future.“

“UCloud offers a wide range of cloud computing services through its global data-center infrastructures. Deploying Mellanox’s SmartNICs throughout our cloud data-centers has already enabled us to meet the increasing demand for consistent and predictable performance“, said Leo Xu, director, network group, Ucloud (Shanghai UCloud Cloud Computing Co., Ltd.). “We are excited about Mellanox’s new programmable IPUs introducing software-defined networking and storage disaggregation technologies across our bare-metal cloud environments.“

“At Meituan we leverage ML and AI algorithms at massive scale for offering a wide selection of e-commerce services. Deploying Mellanox’s end-to-end technologies has yielded excellent application performance results turning data into actionable value for our growing customer base.” said Michael Zhu, VP, infrastructure technology, Meituan, China’s e-commerce platform for services. “We are excited to see Mellanox introducing its new portfolios of secure cloud SmartNICs and IPUs for accelerating scalable AI workloads.“

“IBM’s enterprise server solutions are designed to deliver the best performance for the most demanding workloads, while providing cutting-edge security and reliability“, said Monica Aggarwal, VP, Cognitive Systems Development. “We look forward to integrating the new Mellanox SmartNIC family into our product portfolio for building highly efficient secured cloud data-centers.“

“The Virtualized Cloud Services (VCS) solution by Nuage Networks from Nokia is integrated with Mellanox ConnectX SmartNIC family to deliver unprecedented performance for telco cloud deployments,” said Saurabh Sandhir, head, product management, Nuage Networks. “Over time as Telco Cloud customers upgrade their networks for Network Function Virtualization (NFV), this innovative integration will be forward compatible to future generation Mellanox SmartNICs to achieve even higher performance. In addition, Nuage Networks’ telco cloud portfolio and customers will benefit from the advanced security and virtualization offloads of Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 SmartNICs.“

“Ubuntu is at the forefront of large cloud infrastructure deployments,” said Stephan Fabel, director, product, Canonical Ltd. “The new Mellanox family of SmartNICs is ideal for delivering advanced offloading and new functionalities for a range of use-cases, providing an enhanced data center management experience when combined with the extensibility of the Ubuntu ecosystem. We proudly partner with Mellanox to take the BlueField-2 IPU-based SmartNICs running Ubuntu to market.“

“Through our partnership with Mellanox and native support of the ConnectX SmartNIC family in F5 application services, including traffic optimization, CGNAT, and DNS, we have solved several VNF specific challenges for our joint customers,” said James Feger, VP and GM, service provider, F5 Networks, Inc. “Taking advantage of the offload capabilities in Mellanox ConnectX-5, we delivered exponential performance improvements in DNS QPS, as well as greater scale and performance for our security workloads. We look forward to supporting the new Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx to help our customers continue to scale their infrastructures and achieve even greater results.“