Mellanox Technologies confirmed that its 25GbE and 100GbE ConnectX®-4 EN family of Ethernet adapters has been deployed in Alibaba's data centers.
Key capabilities of the Mellanox ConnectX-4 Network Interface Cards (NICs):
- RoCE - RDMA over Converged Ethernet - RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) technology is designed to solve the delay of server-side data processing in network transmission, as it enables network adapters to access the application buffer directly, bypassing the kernel, the CPU, and the protocol stack, so the CPU can perform more useful tasks during the I/O transport.
- RDMA (RoCE), based on converged Ethernet, can be implemented on an existing open Ethernet network. With RoCE, there is no need to convert data centers legacy infrastructures, which allows companies to save on capital spending
- DPDK - Data Path Development Kit - provides a framework for fast packet processing in data plane applications. The tool set allows developers to rapidly build new prototypes. The Mellanox open source DPDK software enables industry standard servers and provides the best performance to support large-scale, efficient production deployments of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) solutions such as gateways, load balancers, and enhanced security solutions that help prevent denial of service attacks in the data center.
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