Smart Data Centers Feature Editorial

Mellanox (News - Alert) Technologies, a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end connectivity solutions for data center servers and storage systems, announced that technology will fuel a new breed of next-gen data centers.

Specifically, its ConnectX-2 family of adapters leverages TSMC’s PowerTrim service to achieve best in class power performance of 4.5W for dual 10GbE ports.

The technology is part of Mellanox’s energy-efficient data center initiative and delivers a 20 percent overall power leakage reduction in Mellanox’s present generation of adapter products. PowerTrim is a patented power optimization technology platform based on TSMC’s advanced manufacturing processes for reducing leakage in devices manufactured on TSMC 90nm and smaller process geometries.

The ConnectX-2 adapter delivers up to 30% less power consumption than its predecessor. The efficiency features help data centers to lower their power and cooling costs for server and storage I/O. ConnectX-2, with its integrated NIC (News - Alert) and PHY, by minimizing board real-estate provides additional cost and power savings.

John Monson, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies, said that delivering additional hardware features such as ultra low-latency, integrated PHY technology, T-11 compliant FCoE, and SR-IOV virtualization support into the latest ConnectX-2 platform was a critical product goal. He said that the company was able to add these additional features and reduce power using PowerTrim to deliver best-in-class performance and power consumption.

The advanced capabilities of ConnectX-2 with Hypervisor offloads and a complete PCI (News - Alert)-SIG Single Root I/O Virtualization (SRIOV) technology, free up CPU resources helping each virtual machine to achieve native operating system performance. Resource isolation and protection ensures virtual machine security.

Tzvika Shmueli, drector of backend chip design at Mellanox Technologies stated that reducing power consumption and associated heat dissipation has become key considerations by the data center customers. He said that working closely with TSMC and Tela Innovations under the PowerTrim program, the company was able to reduce power leakage while improving yield. He also stated that company is encouraged by the excellent results and plan to expand the PowerTrim technology usage.

S.T. Juang, senior director, Design Infrastructure Marketing at TSMC said that “working with customers like Mellanox and partners like Tela Innovations is the heart of TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform initiative.”

Mellanox products deliver a good bandwidth, performance, scalability, power conservation and cost-effectiveness while converging multiple legacy network technologies into one future-proof solution.