Smart Data Centers Feature Editorial

Mellanox (News - Alert) Technologies, a leading supplier of end-to-end connectivity solutions for data center servers and storage, partnered with Dell to deploy its ConnectX- 2 I/O mezzanine adapter card with Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) technology and PhyX PHY technology within the Dell (News - Alert) 10G Ethernet Pass through II module for the PowerEdge M1000e Dell Chassis and M-Series Blade Servers. When used in conjunction with Dell's 10G Ethernet Pass Through II module or the Mellanox InfiniScale IV InfiniBand-based M3601Q blade switch, the ConnectX-2 mezzanine cards provides added flexibility for data centers since the M-Series servers can attach to InfiniBand and/or 10G Ethernet networks via a single mezzanine card.

The ConnectX-2 VPI-enabled adapters deliver unmatched clustering, GPU based computing and I/O virtualization performance and its comprehensive software suite are suitable for a host of business and clustering applications. In a release, John Monson, VP of marketing at Mellanox Technologies, commented, “The demands on data center I/O connectivity continue to increase with the deployment of many-core CPUs, virtualization, networked storage, clustered databases, and low-latency applications in financial services, Cloud computing, Web 2.0, and the commercial high-performance computing sector.” According to John, Mellanox's connectivity products and Dell blade servers combine to deliver a simplified, cost-effective solution leveraging next-generation data center and cluster performances and flexibility requirements.

Mellanox ConnectX-2 VPI cards can automatically configure its ports to support InfiniBand or Ethernet depending on the switch fabric. ConnectX-2 VPI card utilizing InfiniBand delivers latency of 1us thus enabling high server productivity with support for application and communication offloads using CORE-Direct and enhanced GPU efficiency via NVDIA GPUDirect. On the other hand ConnectX-2 10GbE delivers lowest latency of 1.3us with support for RoCE. IT managers can easily boot the servers from remote InfiniBand or LAN storage targets using FlexBoot application. The card’s Virtual Intelligent Queuing (Virtual-IQ) technology ensures dedicated adapter resources whilst isolating and protecting the server virtual machines. I/O virtualization reduces cost, power and cable complexity along with optimized server utilization and LAN and SAN unification.

The Dell 10G Ethernet Pass Through II module utilizing the integrated Mellanox PhyX PHY devices with its low latency 16 SFP+ ports delivers a cost-effective, low power solution for connecting the PowerEdge M1000e to larger 10G Ethernet fabrics.