Mellanox and Dell Demonstrated 40Gb IB

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that its 40Gb/s InfiniBand ConnectX adapter and InfiniScale IV switch products has been demonstrated in a Dell PowerEdge M1000e-series Blade Enclosure at the SC08 show in Austin, Texas. To be held in the Mellanox booth at the show, this will be the world’s first demonstration of 40Gb/s interconnect technology for blade servers, and will demonstrate the importance of higher I/O performance for enterprise and high-performance data centers.

“Mellanox 40Gb/s adapters and switch silicon were announced only a few months ago, and now today we are able to demonstrate the products in a mainstream blade server architecture,” said Eyal Waldman, chairman, president, and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. “We are pleased to partner with Dell at SC08 to show the advantages of our next-generation InfiniBand solutions in a high-performance blade server. We believe that 40Gb/s InfiniBand delivers significant productivity benefits to enterprise and scientific computing users alike, especially in a robust system like the PowerEdge M1000e-series Blade Enclosure.”

Dell’s PowerEdge M1000e-series Blade Enclosures feature Mellanox 20Gb/s DDR (double data rate) products, which places them at the top of the performance curve for currently-available blade servers. But this week’s demonstration of Mellanox 40Gb/s QDR (quad data rate) products shows not only the importance of this boost in I/O performance, but the ability of the M1000e-series system’s midplane to fully leverage such performance upgrades.

“Dell continually strives to expand the performance envelope for its server and blade server products, and Mellanox solutions now enable us to demonstrate the first blade server system with 40Gb/s InfiniBand interconnect,” said Kevin Kettler, CTO at Dell Inc. “By doubling the I/O bandwidth of our blade systems, we believe we can significantly improve application performance and productivity in enterprise and high-performance data centers.”