Mellanox Bluefield Series

NVIDIA BLUEFIELD-2 P-Series DPU 25GBE Dual-Port

Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip

The NVIDIA® BlueField®-2 data processing unit (DPU) is the world’s first data center infrastructure-on-a-chip optimized for traditional enterprises’ modern cloud workloads and high performance computing. It delivers a broad set of accelerated software-defined networking, storage, security, and management services with the ability to offload, accelerate and isolate data center infrastructure. With its 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand connectivity, the BlueField-2 DPU enables organizations to transform their IT infrastructures into state-of-the-art data centers that are accelerated, fully programmable, and armed with “zero trust” security to prevent data breaches and cyber attacks.


By combining the industry-leading NVIDIA ConnectX®-6 Dx network adapter with an array of Arm® cores and infrastructure-specific offloads, BlueField-2 offers purpose-built, hardware-acceleration engines with full software programmability. Sitting at the edge of every server, BlueField-2 empowers agile, secured and high-performance cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, all while reducing the total cost of ownership and increasing data center efficiency.


The NVIDIA DOCA™ software framework enables developers to rapidly create applications and services for the BlueField-2 DPU. NVIDIA DOCA makes it easy to leverage DPU hardware accelerators, providing breakthrough data center performance, efficiency and security.




Key Software-Defined, Hardware-Accelerated Applications

Networking
vSwitch/vRouter, NAT, load balancer, NFV



Storage
NVMe™ over fabrics (NVMe-oF™), elastic storage virtualization, hyper converged infrastructure (HCI), encryption, data integrity, compression, data deduplication



Security
Next-Generation firewall, IDS/IPS, root of trust, micro-segmentation, DDOS prevention

 

Key Features Security • Hardware root of trust • Accelerates a wide range of security, networking, storage and other workloads • IPsec/TLS and AES-XTS encryption acceleration • Connection tracking for stateful firewall and IDS/IPS • Regular expression (RegEx) matching processor • Hardened isolation layer Storage • NVIDIA GPUDirect® Storage • Elastic block storage enabled by BlueField SNAP storage virtualization • Compression and decompression acceleration • NVMe-oF acceleration • VirtIO-blk acceleration Networking • RoCE, Zero Touch RoCE • GPUDirect • SDN acceleration powered by NVIDIA ASAP2 - Accelerated Switching and Packet Processing® • Overlay network offloads including VXLAN • VirtIO-blk acceleration Management • Authenticated product life-cycle management • Telemetry agents Portfolio • Dual ports of up to 100Gb/s, or a single port of 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand • 16GB / 32GB of on-board DDR4 memory • Card form factors: HHHL, and FHHL • 1GbE out-of-band management port




Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip The NVIDIA BlueField-2 data processing unit (DPU) is a data center infrastructure on a chip optimized for traditional enterprise, high-performance computing (HPC), and modern cloud workloads, delivering a broad set of accelerated software-defined networking, storage, security, and management services. The BlueField-2 DPU enables organizations to transform their IT infrastructures into state-of-the-art data centers that are accelerated, fully programmable, and armed with zero trust security to prevent data breaches and cyber attacks.


Full specification and details can be found in the Product Datasheet PDF file

NVIDIA BLUEFIELD-2 E-Series DPU 100GbE Crypto and Secure Boot Disabled

Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip

The NVIDIA® BlueField®-2 data processing unit (DPU) is the world’s first data center infrastructure-on-a-chip optimized for traditional enterprises’ modern cloud workloads and high performance computing. It delivers a broad set of accelerated software-defined networking, storage, security, and management services with the ability to offload, accelerate and isolate data center infrastructure. With its 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand connectivity, the BlueField-2 DPU enables organizations to transform their IT infrastructures into state-of-the-art data centers that are accelerated, fully programmable, and armed with “zero trust” security to prevent data breaches and cyber attacks.


By combining the industry-leading NVIDIA ConnectX®-6 Dx network adapter with an array of Arm® cores and infrastructure-specific offloads, BlueField-2 offers purpose-built, hardware-acceleration engines with full software programmability. Sitting at the edge of every server, BlueField-2 empowers agile, secured and high-performance cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, all while reducing the total cost of ownership and increasing data center efficiency.


The NVIDIA DOCA™ software framework enables developers to rapidly create applications and services for the BlueField-2 DPU. NVIDIA DOCA makes it easy to leverage DPU hardware accelerators, providing breakthrough data center performance, efficiency and security.




Key Software-Defined, Hardware-Accelerated Applications

Networking
vSwitch/vRouter, NAT, load balancer, NFV



Storage
NVMe™ over fabrics (NVMe-oF™), elastic storage virtualization, hyper converged infrastructure (HCI), encryption, data integrity, compression, data deduplication



Security
Next-Generation firewall, IDS/IPS, root of trust, micro-segmentation, DDOS prevention

 

Key Features Security • Hardware root of trust • Accelerates a wide range of security, networking, storage and other workloads • IPsec/TLS and AES-XTS encryption acceleration • Connection tracking for stateful firewall and IDS/IPS • Regular expression (RegEx) matching processor • Hardened isolation layer Storage • NVIDIA GPUDirect® Storage • Elastic block storage enabled by BlueField SNAP storage virtualization • Compression and decompression acceleration • NVMe-oF acceleration • VirtIO-blk acceleration Networking • RoCE, Zero Touch RoCE • GPUDirect • SDN acceleration powered by NVIDIA ASAP2 - Accelerated Switching and Packet Processing® • Overlay network offloads including VXLAN • VirtIO-blk acceleration Management • Authenticated product life-cycle management • Telemetry agents Portfolio • Dual ports of up to 100Gb/s, or a single port of 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand • 16GB / 32GB of on-board DDR4 memory • Card form factors: HHHL, and FHHL • 1GbE out-of-band management port




Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip The NVIDIA BlueField-2 data processing unit (DPU) is a data center infrastructure on a chip optimized for traditional enterprise, high-performance computing (HPC), and modern cloud workloads, delivering a broad set of accelerated software-defined networking, storage, security, and management services. The BlueField-2 DPU enables organizations to transform their IT infrastructures into state-of-the-art data centers that are accelerated, fully programmable, and armed with zero trust security to prevent data breaches and cyber attacks.


Full specification and details can be found in the Product Datasheet PDF file

NVIDIA BLUEFIELD-2 E-Series DPU 100GBE/EDR/HDR100 VPI Dual-Port

Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip

The NVIDIA® BlueField®-2 data processing unit (DPU) is the world’s first data center infrastructure-on-a-chip optimized for traditional enterprises’ modern cloud workloads and high performance computing. It delivers a broad set of accelerated software-defined networking, storage, security, and management services with the ability to offload, accelerate and isolate data center infrastructure. With its 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand connectivity, the BlueField-2 DPU enables organizations to transform their IT infrastructures into state-of-the-art data centers that are accelerated, fully programmable, and armed with “zero trust” security to prevent data breaches and cyber attacks.


By combining the industry-leading NVIDIA ConnectX®-6 Dx network adapter with an array of Arm® cores and infrastructure-specific offloads, BlueField-2 offers purpose-built, hardware-acceleration engines with full software programmability. Sitting at the edge of every server, BlueField-2 empowers agile, secured and high-performance cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, all while reducing the total cost of ownership and increasing data center efficiency.


The NVIDIA DOCA™ software framework enables developers to rapidly create applications and services for the BlueField-2 DPU. NVIDIA DOCA makes it easy to leverage DPU hardware accelerators, providing breakthrough data center performance, efficiency and security.




Key Software-Defined, Hardware-Accelerated Applications

Networking
vSwitch/vRouter, NAT, load balancer, NFV



Storage
NVMe™ over fabrics (NVMe-oF™), elastic storage virtualization, hyper converged infrastructure (HCI), encryption, data integrity, compression, data deduplication



Security
Next-Generation firewall, IDS/IPS, root of trust, micro-segmentation, DDOS prevention

 

Key Features Security • Hardware root of trust • Accelerates a wide range of security, networking, storage and other workloads • IPsec/TLS and AES-XTS encryption acceleration • Connection tracking for stateful firewall and IDS/IPS • Regular expression (RegEx) matching processor • Hardened isolation layer Storage • NVIDIA GPUDirect® Storage • Elastic block storage enabled by BlueField SNAP storage virtualization • Compression and decompression acceleration • NVMe-oF acceleration • VirtIO-blk acceleration Networking • RoCE, Zero Touch RoCE • GPUDirect • SDN acceleration powered by NVIDIA ASAP2 - Accelerated Switching and Packet Processing® • Overlay network offloads including VXLAN • VirtIO-blk acceleration Management • Authenticated product life-cycle management • Telemetry agents Portfolio • Dual ports of up to 100Gb/s, or a single port of 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand • 16GB / 32GB of on-board DDR4 memory • Card form factors: HHHL, and FHHL • 1GbE out-of-band management port




Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip The NVIDIA BlueField-2 data processing unit (DPU) is a data center infrastructure on a chip optimized for traditional enterprise, high-performance computing (HPC), and modern cloud workloads, delivering a broad set of accelerated software-defined networking, storage, security, and management services. The BlueField-2 DPU enables organizations to transform their IT infrastructures into state-of-the-art data centers that are accelerated, fully programmable, and armed with zero trust security to prevent data breaches and cyber attacks.


Full specification and details can be found in the Product Datasheet PDF file

NVIDIA BLUEFIELD-2 E-Series DPU 100GBE Dual-Port Crypto and Secure Boot Enabled

Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip

The NVIDIA® BlueField®-2 data processing unit (DPU) is the world’s first data center infrastructure-on-a-chip optimized for traditional enterprises’ modern cloud workloads and high performance computing. It delivers a broad set of accelerated software-defined networking, storage, security, and management services with the ability to offload, accelerate and isolate data center infrastructure. With its 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand connectivity, the BlueField-2 DPU enables organizations to transform their IT infrastructures into state-of-the-art data centers that are accelerated, fully programmable, and armed with “zero trust” security to prevent data breaches and cyber attacks.


By combining the industry-leading NVIDIA ConnectX®-6 Dx network adapter with an array of Arm® cores and infrastructure-specific offloads, BlueField-2 offers purpose-built, hardware-acceleration engines with full software programmability. Sitting at the edge of every server, BlueField-2 empowers agile, secured and high-performance cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, all while reducing the total cost of ownership and increasing data center efficiency.


The NVIDIA DOCA™ software framework enables developers to rapidly create applications and services for the BlueField-2 DPU. NVIDIA DOCA makes it easy to leverage DPU hardware accelerators, providing breakthrough data center performance, efficiency and security.




Key Software-Defined, Hardware-Accelerated Applications

Networking
vSwitch/vRouter, NAT, load balancer, NFV



Storage
NVMe™ over fabrics (NVMe-oF™), elastic storage virtualization, hyper converged infrastructure (HCI), encryption, data integrity, compression, data deduplication



Security
Next-Generation firewall, IDS/IPS, root of trust, micro-segmentation, DDOS prevention

 

Key Features Security • Hardware root of trust • Accelerates a wide range of security, networking, storage and other workloads • IPsec/TLS and AES-XTS encryption acceleration • Connection tracking for stateful firewall and IDS/IPS • Regular expression (RegEx) matching processor • Hardened isolation layer Storage • NVIDIA GPUDirect® Storage • Elastic block storage enabled by BlueField SNAP storage virtualization • Compression and decompression acceleration • NVMe-oF acceleration • VirtIO-blk acceleration Networking • RoCE, Zero Touch RoCE • GPUDirect • SDN acceleration powered by NVIDIA ASAP2 - Accelerated Switching and Packet Processing® • Overlay network offloads including VXLAN • VirtIO-blk acceleration Management • Authenticated product life-cycle management • Telemetry agents Portfolio • Dual ports of up to 100Gb/s, or a single port of 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand • 16GB / 32GB of on-board DDR4 memory • Card form factors: HHHL, and FHHL • 1GbE out-of-band management port




Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip The NVIDIA BlueField-2 data processing unit (DPU) is a data center infrastructure on a chip optimized for traditional enterprise, high-performance computing (HPC), and modern cloud workloads, delivering a broad set of accelerated software-defined networking, storage, security, and management services. The BlueField-2 DPU enables organizations to transform their IT infrastructures into state-of-the-art data centers that are accelerated, fully programmable, and armed with zero trust security to prevent data breaches and cyber attacks.


Full specification and details can be found in the Product Datasheet PDF file

NVIDIA BLUEFIELD-2 E-Series DPU 100GBE/EDR/HDR100 VPI Dual-Port

Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip

The NVIDIA® BlueField®-2 data processing unit (DPU) is the world’s first data center infrastructure-on-a-chip optimized for traditional enterprises’ modern cloud workloads and high performance computing. It delivers a broad set of accelerated software-defined networking, storage, security, and management services with the ability to offload, accelerate and isolate data center infrastructure. With its 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand connectivity, the BlueField-2 DPU enables organizations to transform their IT infrastructures into state-of-the-art data centers that are accelerated, fully programmable, and armed with “zero trust” security to prevent data breaches and cyber attacks.


By combining the industry-leading NVIDIA ConnectX®-6 Dx network adapter with an array of Arm® cores and infrastructure-specific offloads, BlueField-2 offers purpose-built, hardware-acceleration engines with full software programmability. Sitting at the edge of every server, BlueField-2 empowers agile, secured and high-performance cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, all while reducing the total cost of ownership and increasing data center efficiency.


The NVIDIA DOCA™ software framework enables developers to rapidly create applications and services for the BlueField-2 DPU. NVIDIA DOCA makes it easy to leverage DPU hardware accelerators, providing breakthrough data center performance, efficiency and security.




Key Software-Defined, Hardware-Accelerated Applications

Networking
vSwitch/vRouter, NAT, load balancer, NFV



Storage
NVMe™ over fabrics (NVMe-oF™), elastic storage virtualization, hyper converged infrastructure (HCI), encryption, data integrity, compression, data deduplication



Security
Next-Generation firewall, IDS/IPS, root of trust, micro-segmentation, DDOS prevention

 

Key Features Security

• Hardware root of trust

• Accelerates a wide range of security, networking, storage and other workloads

• IPsec/TLS and AES-XTS encryption acceleration

• Connection tracking for stateful firewall and IDS/IPS

• Regular expression (RegEx) matching processor

• Hardened isolation layer

Storage

• NVIDIA GPUDirect® Storage

• Elastic block storage enabled by BlueField SNAP storage virtualization

• Compression and decompression acceleration

• NVMe-oF acceleration

• VirtIO-blk acceleration

Networking

• RoCE, Zero Touch RoCE

• GPUDirect

• SDN acceleration powered by NVIDIA ASAP2 - Accelerated Switching and Packet Processing®

• Overlay network offloads including VXLAN

• VirtIO-blk acceleration

Management

• Authenticated product life-cycle management

• Telemetry agents

Portfolio

• Dual ports of up to 100Gb/s, or a single port of 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand

• 16GB / 32GB of on-board DDR4 memory

• Card form factors: HHHL, and FHHL

• 1GbE out-of-band management port


Full specification and details can be found in the Product Datasheet PDF file

NVIDIA BLUEFIELD-2 E-Series DPU 100GBE Dual-Port

Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip

The NVIDIA® BlueField®-2 data processing unit (DPU) is the world’s first data center infrastructure-on-a-chip optimized for traditional enterprises’ modern cloud workloads and high performance computing. It delivers a broad set of accelerated software-defined networking, storage, security, and management services with the ability to offload, accelerate and isolate data center infrastructure. With its 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand connectivity, the BlueField-2 DPU enables organizations to transform their IT infrastructures into state-of-the-art data centers that are accelerated, fully programmable, and armed with “zero trust” security to prevent data breaches and cyber attacks.


By combining the industry-leading NVIDIA ConnectX®-6 Dx network adapter with an array of Arm® cores and infrastructure-specific offloads, BlueField-2 offers purpose-built, hardware-acceleration engines with full software programmability. Sitting at the edge of every server, BlueField-2 empowers agile, secured and high-performance cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, all while reducing the total cost of ownership and increasing data center efficiency.


The NVIDIA DOCA™ software framework enables developers to rapidly create applications and services for the BlueField-2 DPU. NVIDIA DOCA makes it easy to leverage DPU hardware accelerators, providing breakthrough data center performance, efficiency and security.




Key Software-Defined, Hardware-Accelerated Applications

Networking
vSwitch/vRouter, NAT, load balancer, NFV



Storage
NVMe™ over fabrics (NVMe-oF™), elastic storage virtualization, hyper converged infrastructure (HCI), encryption, data integrity, compression, data deduplication



Security
Next-Generation firewall, IDS/IPS, root of trust, micro-segmentation, DDOS prevention

 

Key Features Security • Hardware root of trust • Accelerates a wide range of security, networking, storage and other workloads • IPsec/TLS and AES-XTS encryption acceleration • Connection tracking for stateful firewall and IDS/IPS • Regular expression (RegEx) matching processor • Hardened isolation layer Storage • NVIDIA GPUDirect® Storage • Elastic block storage enabled by BlueField SNAP storage virtualization • Compression and decompression acceleration • NVMe-oF acceleration • VirtIO-blk acceleration Networking • RoCE, Zero Touch RoCE • GPUDirect • SDN acceleration powered by NVIDIA ASAP2 - Accelerated Switching and Packet Processing® • Overlay network offloads including VXLAN • VirtIO-blk acceleration Management • Authenticated product life-cycle management • Telemetry agents Portfolio • Dual ports of up to 100Gb/s, or a single port of 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand • 16GB / 32GB of on-board DDR4 memory • Card form factors: HHHL, and FHHL • 1GbE out-of-band management port




Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip The NVIDIA BlueField-2 data processing unit (DPU) is a data center infrastructure on a chip optimized for traditional enterprise, high-performance computing (HPC), and modern cloud workloads, delivering a broad set of accelerated software-defined networking, storage, security, and management services. The BlueField-2 DPU enables organizations to transform their IT infrastructures into state-of-the-art data centers that are accelerated, fully programmable, and armed with zero trust security to prevent data breaches and cyber attacks.


Full specification and details can be found in the Product Datasheet PDF file

NVIDIA BLUEFIELD-2 E-Series DPU 100GbE Dual-Port

Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip

The NVIDIA® BlueField®-2 data processing unit (DPU) is the world’s first data center infrastructure-on-a-chip optimized for traditional enterprises’ modern cloud workloads and high performance computing. It delivers a broad set of accelerated software-defined networking, storage, security, and management services with the ability to offload, accelerate and isolate data center infrastructure. With its 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand connectivity, the BlueField-2 DPU enables organizations to transform their IT infrastructures into state-of-the-art data centers that are accelerated, fully programmable, and armed with “zero trust” security to prevent data breaches and cyber attacks.


By combining the industry-leading NVIDIA ConnectX®-6 Dx network adapter with an array of Arm® cores and infrastructure-specific offloads, BlueField-2 offers purpose-built, hardware-acceleration engines with full software programmability. Sitting at the edge of every server, BlueField-2 empowers agile, secured and high-performance cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, all while reducing the total cost of ownership and increasing data center efficiency.


The NVIDIA DOCA™ software framework enables developers to rapidly create applications and services for the BlueField-2 DPU. NVIDIA DOCA makes it easy to leverage DPU hardware accelerators, providing breakthrough data center performance, efficiency and security.




Key Software-Defined, Hardware-Accelerated Applications

Networking
vSwitch/vRouter, NAT, load balancer, NFV



Storage
NVMe™ over fabrics (NVMe-oF™), elastic storage virtualization, hyper converged infrastructure (HCI), encryption, data integrity, compression, data deduplication



Security
Next-Generation firewall, IDS/IPS, root of trust, micro-segmentation, DDOS prevention

 

Key Features Security • Hardware root of trust • Accelerates a wide range of security, networking, storage and other workloads • IPsec/TLS and AES-XTS encryption acceleration • Connection tracking for stateful firewall and IDS/IPS • Regular expression (RegEx) matching processor • Hardened isolation layer Storage • NVIDIA GPUDirect® Storage • Elastic block storage enabled by BlueField SNAP storage virtualization • Compression and decompression acceleration • NVMe-oF acceleration • VirtIO-blk acceleration Networking • RoCE, Zero Touch RoCE • GPUDirect • SDN acceleration powered by NVIDIA ASAP2 - Accelerated Switching and Packet Processing® • Overlay network offloads including VXLAN • VirtIO-blk acceleration Management • Authenticated product life-cycle management • Telemetry agents Portfolio • Dual ports of up to 100Gb/s, or a single port of 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand • 16GB / 32GB of on-board DDR4 memory • Card form factors: HHHL, and FHHL • 1GbE out-of-band management port




Data Center Infrastructure on a Chip The NVIDIA BlueField-2 data processing unit (DPU) is a data center infrastructure on a chip optimized for traditional enterprise, high-performance computing (HPC), and modern cloud workloads, delivering a broad set of accelerated software-defined networking, storage, security, and management services. The BlueField-2 DPU enables organizations to transform their IT infrastructures into state-of-the-art data centers that are accelerated, fully programmable, and armed with zero trust security to prevent data breaches and cyber attacks.


Full specification and details can be found in the Product Datasheet PDF file

NVIDIA® Mellanox® BlueField® SmartNIC for Ethernet

High Performance Ethernet Network Adapter Cards

Combining Arm® processing power with advanced network and storage offloads to accelerate a multitude of security, networking and storage applications with world-leading performance, flexibility and efficiency.




Product Highlights • Intelligent programmable network adapter • Best-in-class hardware offloads with Arm processing power • Accelerates a wide range of security, networking, storage and other workloads • Dedicated hardware offload for NVMeover-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) • Dual-port 25GbE PCIe Gen4.0 x8 • Dual-port 100GbE PCIe Gen4.0 x16 • 8 or 16 Arm A72 cores, depending upon model • 4/8/16GB on-board DDR4 memory, depending upon model • Various form factors • Standard embedded Linux software stack • Hardware-based security isolation




Powerful & Smart Network Adapter BlueField SmartNIC adapters accelerate a wide range of applications through flexible data and control plane offloading. Enabling a more efficient use of compute resources, BlueField adapters empower the CPU to focus on running applications rather than on networking or security processing. Additionally, as software-defined adapters, BlueField SmartNICs ensure the ultimate flexibility by adapting to future protocols and features through simple software updates.




BlueField System-on-Chip BlueField is a Mellanox family of advanced solutions that integrates a coherent mesh of 64-bit Armv8 A72 cores, a ConnectX network adapter front-end and a PCI Express switch into a single chip. The powerful DPU architecture includes a 64-bit Armv8 multicore processor array and enables customers to develop sophisticated applications and highly differentiated feature sets. BlueField leverages the rich Arm software ecosystem and introduces the ability to offload the x86 software stack. At the heart of BlueField is the ConnectX-5 network controller with DMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and InfiniBand offload technology, which delivers cutting-edge performance for networking and storage applications such as NVMe over Fabrics. Advanced features include an embedded virtual switch with programmable access lists (ACLs), transport offloads and stateless protocols.




Security Applications BlueField SmartNIC addresses the concerns of modern data centers by combining hardware encryption accelerators with embedded software and fully integrated advanced network capabilities, making it an ideal platform for developing proprietary security applications. It enables a distributed security architecture by isolating and protecting each individual workload and providing flexible control and visibility at the server and workload level, controlling risk at the server access layer. BlueField builds security into the DNA of the data center and enables prevention, detection and response to potential threats in real time. BlueField SmartNIC is capable of delivering powerful functionality, including encryption of data-in-motion, bare metal provisioning, stateful L4 firewall and more.




Networking Applications BlueField SmartNIC offers a wide range of dedicated offloads to maximize virtualization scalability and efficiency. Data center administrators can benefit from better server utilization, allowing more virtual machines and more tenants on the same hardware, while reducing the TCO, power, and cable complexity. Among its accelerations: • Mellanox ASAP2 - Accelerated Switching and Packet Processing® for Open vSwitch (OVS) delivers flexible, highly efficient virtual switching and routing capabilities. OVS accelerations can be further enhanced using BlueField processing and memory. For example, the scale of OVS actions can be increased by utilizing BlueField internal memory, and more OVS actions and vSwitch/vRouter implementations can be supported. • Network overlay technology (VXLAN, NVGRE, Geneve) offload, including encapsulation and decapsulation, allows the traditional offloads to operate on the tunneled protocols and also offload Network Address Translation (NAT) routing capabilities.




Storage Applications BlueField SmartNIC may operate as a co-processor offloading specific storage tasks from the host, isolating part of the storage media from the host, or enabling abstraction of software-defined storage logic, using both a BlueField-dedicated hardware offload for NVMe-overFabrics and Arm cores. On the storage initiator side, BlueField SmartNICs can prove an efficient solution for hyperconverged systems to enable the host CPU to focus on compute while all the storage and networking tasks are handled through the NIC engine and Arm cores. Decoupling of the storage tasks from the compute tasks also simplifies the software model, enabling the deployment of multiple OS virtual machines while the storage application is handled solely by the Arm Linux subsystem.




Mellanox NVMe SNAP NVMe SNAP (Software-defined Network Accelerated Processing) enables hardware virtualization of NVMe storage. The Mellanox NVMe SNAP framework enables customers to easily integrate networked storage solutions into their cloud or enterprise server deployments. NVMe SNAP brings virtualized storage to bare-metal clouds and makes composable storage simple, promoting CAPEX and OPEX savings. It enables the efficient disaggregation of compute and storage to allow fully-optimized resource utilization NVMe SNAP logically presents networked storage as a local NVMe drive on the PCIe bus to host software. This allows the host OS/ Hypervisor to use a standard NVMe-driver instead of different network storage protocols. NVMe SNAP empowers customers with the freedom to implement their own storage technology and solutions on top of the NVMe SNAP framework that runs on Mellanox BlueField™ embedded Arm cores along with embedded hardware storage acceleration engines. This powerful combination is agile yet completely transparent to host software, allowing NVMe SNAP to be integrated into almost any storage solution. NVMe SNAP is a licensed software available on select BlueField part numbers, see Table 1 and Table 2 for more information.




Software Support BlueField SmartNIC is shipped with Mellanox BlueOS® but other operating systems, such as RH xx.xx and others, are also supported. BlueOS is a Linux reference distribution, which includes the Mellanox OFED stack, and is capable of running all customer-based Linux applications seamlessly. BlueOS itself is based on the Yocto Project Poky distribution. A PXE driver is also pre-installed. The BlueField adapter execution environment is fully isolated from the x86 server and network environment, and can run the Open vSwitch Database (OVSDB) or other virtual switches to create a secure solution for bare metal provisioning. The software package also includes support for DPDK, and applications for encryption and a stateful L4-based firewall.


Full specification and details can be found in the Product Datasheet PDF file