Mellanox's latest SmartNICs deliver 200G I/O and Security

Mellanox introduced its latest generation ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 Secure Cloud SmartNICs for data center servers and storage systems.

The ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNICs provide up to two ports of 25, 50 or 100Gbps, or a single port of 200Gbps, Ethernet connectivity powered by 50Gbps PAM4 SerDes technology and PCIe 4.0 host connectivity.

Significantly, the new SmartNICs' hardware offload engines include IPsec and inline TLS data-in-motion cryptography, advanced network virtualization, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage accelerations. ConnectX-6 Dx provides 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, etc.

Mellanox said its BlueField-2 IPU integrates all the advanced capabilities of ConnectX-6 Dx with an array of powerful Arm processor cores, high performance memory interfaces, and flexible processing capabilities in a single System-on-Chip (SoC), supporting both Ethernet and InfiniBand connectivity up to 200Gbps. ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 also offer built-in SR-IOV, Open vSwitch (OVS), and VirtIO hardware accelerators. Mellanox is also introducing additional network virtualization offloads, enhanced programmability and extreme scale capabilities.

“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, vice president, Ethernet NIC and SoC at Mellanox. “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 total cost of ownership.”

“Baidu is an AI cloud giant tasked with delivering results at the speed of thought,” said Liu Ning, director of system department, Baidu. “Therefore, we have partnered with Mellanox, the leader in high-performance networking, whose high-speed connectivity solutions today supports Baidu’s machine learning platforms. We look forward to this new release of Mellanox’s programmable cloud SmartNICs and IPUs to deliver best-in-class network performance for accelerating scalable AI-driven applications.”

“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, vice president of 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.”

https://www.mellanox.com/products/bluefield2-overview/