Mellanox ConnectX-4 EN MCX415A-BCAT – Network Adapter – PCIe 3.0 x16 – 40Gb Ethernet / 56Gb Ethernet

Mellanox ConnectX-4 EN network controller cards with 100Gb/s Ethernet connectivity provide a high-performance and flexible solution for Web 2.0,Cloud,data analytics,database,and storage platforms. With the exponential growth of data being shared and stored by applications and social networks,the need for high-speed and high performance compute and storage data centers is skyrocketing. ConnectX-4 EN provides high performance for demanding data centers,public and private clouds,Web 2.0 and Big Data applications,and storage systems,enabling today’s corporations to meet the demands of the data explosion. ConnectX-4 EN provides an unmatched combination of 100Gb/s bandwidth in a single port,low latency,and specific hardware offloads,addressing both today’s and the next generation’s compute and storage data center demands.

• I/O virtualization
• ConnectX-4 EN SR-IOV technology provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VMs) within the server. I/O virtualization with ConnectX-4 EN gives data center administrators better server utilization while reducing cost,power,and cable complexity,allowing more Virtual Machines and more tenants on the same hardware.
• Overlay networks
• In order to better scale their networks,data center operators often create overlay networks that carry traffic from individual virtual machines over logical tunnels in encapsulated formats such as NVGRE. While this solves network scalability issues,it hides the TCP packet from the hardware offloading engines,placing higher loads on the host CPU. ConnectX-4 effectively addresses this by providing advanced NVGRE and GENEVE hardware offloading engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay protocol headers,enabling the traditional offloads to be performed on the encapsulated traffic.
• RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)
• ConnectX-4 EN supports RoCE specifications delivering low-latency and high-performance over Ethernet networks. Leveraging data center bridging (DCB) capabilities as well as ConnectX-4 EN advanced congestion control hardware mechanisms,RoCE provides efficient low-latency RDMA services over Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks.
• Storage acceleration
• Storage applications will see improved performance with the high bandwidth that ConnectX-4 EN delivers. Moreover,standard block and file access protocols can leverage RoCE for high-performance storage access. A consolidated compute and storage network achieves significant cost-performance advantages over multi-fabric networks.
• Signature handover
• ConnectX-4 EN supports hardware checking of T10 Data Integrity Field/Protection Information (T10-DIF/PI),reducing the CPU overhead and accelerating delivery of data to the application. Signature handover is handled by the adapter on ingress and/or egress packets,reducing the load on the CPU at the initiator and/or target machines.
• Host management
• Mellanox host management and control capabilities include NC-SI over MCTP over SMBus,and MCTP over PCIe – Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) interface,as well as PLDM for Monitor and Control DSP0248 and PLDM for Firmware Update DSP0267.