ConnectX-6 Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) cards are a groundbreaking addition to the ConnectX series of solid adapter cards. ConnectX-6 VPI cards enable high performance and flexible solution aimed at meeting the continually growing demands of data center applications. In addition to all the existing innovative features of past versions, ConnectX-6 cards offer a number of enhancements to further improve performance and scalability. ConnectX-6 VPI card supports HDR, HDR100, EDR, FDR, QDR, DDR and SDR InfiniBand speeds as well as 200, 100, 50, 40, 25, and 10 Gb/s Ethernet speeds.
- Industry-leading throughput, low latency, low CPU utilization and high message rate
- Innovative rack design for storage and Machine Learning based on Host Chaining technology
- Smart interconnect for x86, Power, ARM, and GPU-based compute and storage platforms
- Advanced storage capabilities including NVMe over Fabric offloads
- Intelligent network adapter supporting flexible pipeline programmability
- Cutting-edge performance in virtualized networks including Network Function Virtualization (NFV)
- Enabler for efficient service chaining capabilities
HPC environments
By delivering 200 Gb/s HDR InfiniBand, 100 Gb/s HDR100 InfiniBand and 200 Gb/s Ethernet speeds, ConnectX-6 VPI is the perfect product to lead HPC data centers toward Exascale levels of performance and scalability. ConnectX-6 supports the evolving co-design paradigm, which transforms the network into a distributed processor. With its In-Network Computing and In-Network Memory capabilities, ConnectX-6 offloads computation even further to the network, saving CPU cycles and increasing network efficiency. ConnectX-6 VPI utilizes both IBTA RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) and RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) technologies, delivering low-latency and high performance. ConnectX-6 enhances RDMA network capabilities even further by delivering end-to-end packet level flow control.
Machine learning and big data environments
Data analytics has become an essential function within many enterprise data centers, clouds and Hyperscale platforms. Machine learning relies on especially high throughput and low latency to train deep neural networks and to improve recognition and classification accuracy. With 200 Gb/s throughput, ConnectX-6 is the perfect solution to provide machine learning applications with the levels of performance and scalability that they require. ConnectX-6 utilizes the RDMA technology to deliver low-latency and high performance. ConnectX-6 enhances RDMA network capabilities even further by delivering end-to-end packet level flow control.
Security
The ConnectX-6 block-level encryption offers a critical innovation to network security. As data in transit is stored or retrieved, it undergoes encryption and decryption. ConnectX-6 hardware offloads the IEEE AES-XTS encryption/decryption from the CPU, saving latency and CPU utilization. It also ensures protection for users sharing the same resources through the use of dedicated encryption keys. By performing block-storage encryption in the adapter, ConnectX-6 excludes the need for self-encrypted disks. This allows customers the freedom to choose their preferred storage device, including byteaddressable and NVDIMM devices that traditionally do not provide encryption. Moreover, ConnectX-6 can support Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) compliance. ConnectX-6 also includes a hardware Root-of-Trust (RoT) that uses HMAC relying on a device-unique key. This provides both secure boot as well as cloning protection. Delivering reliable device and firmware protection, ConnectX-6 also provides secured debugging capabilities, without the need for physical access.
Storage environments
The evolving NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) protocol leverages RDMA connectivity to remotely access NVMe storage devices efficiently, while keeping the end-to-end NVMe model at low latency. With its NVMe-oF target and initiator offloads, ConnectX-6 brings further optimization to NVMe-oF, enhancing CPU utilization and scalability.
Cloud and Web 2.0 environment
Open vSwitch (OVS) is an example of a virtual switch that allows Virtual Machines to communicate among themselves and with the outside world. Software-based virtual switches, traditionally residing in the hypervisor, are CPU intensive, affecting system performance and preventing full utilization of available CPU for compute functions. To address such performance issues, ConnectX-6 offers Mellanox ASAP2 - Accelerated Switch and Packet Processing technology. ASAP2 offloads the vSwitch/vRouter by handling the data plane in the NIC hardware while maintaining the control plane unmodified. As a result, significantly higher vSwitch/vRouter performance is achieved minus the associated CPU load. The vSwitch/vRouter offload functions supported by ConnectX-5 and ConnectX-6 include encapsulation and de-capsulation of overlay network headers, as well as stateless offloads of inner packets, packet headers re-write (enabling NAT functionality), hairpin, and more. In addition, ConnectX-6 offers intelligent flexible pipeline capabilities, including programmable flexible parser and flexible match-action tables, which enable hardware offloads for future protocols.
