Mellanox MCX613106A-VDAT CONNECTX-6 EN Adapter Card 200GbE Dual-Port

ConnectX-6 EN Adapter Card

200GbE Dual-Port QSFP56 PCIe 4.0 x16 Tall Bracket

World’s first 200GbE Ethernet network interface card, enabling industry-leading performance smart offloads and in-network computing for Cloud, Web 2.0, Big Data, Storage and Machine Learning applications.

ConnectX-6 EN provides up to two ports of 200GbE connectivity, sub 0.8usec latency and 215 million messages per second, enabling the highest performance and most flexible solution for the most demanding data center applications.

Benefits:

• Most intelligent, highest performance fabric for compute and storage infrastructures

• Cutting-edge performance in virtualized HPC networks including Network Function Virtualization (NFV)

• Advanced storage capabilities including block-level encryption and checksum offloads

• Host Chaining technology for economical rack design

• Smart interconnect for x86, Power, Arm, GPU and FPGA-based platforms

• Flexible programmable pipeline for new network flows

• Enabler for efficient service chaining

• Efficient I/O consolidation, lowering data center costs and complexity

ConnectX-6 is a groundbreaking addition to the Mellanox ConnectX series of industry-leading adapter cards. In addition to all the existing innovative features of past versions, ConnectX-6 offers a number of enhancements to further improve performance and scalability, such as support for 200/100/50/40/25/10/1 GbE Ethernet speeds and PCIe Gen 4.0. Moreover, ConnectX-6 Ethernet cards can connect up to 32-lanes of PCIe to achieve 200Gb/s of bandwidth, even on Gen 3.0 PCIe systems.

Features:

• Up to 200GbE connectivity per port

• Maximum bandwidth of 200Gb/s

• Up to 215 million messages/sec

• Sub 0.8usec latency

• Block-level XTS-AES mode hardware encryption

• Optional FIPS-compliant adapter card

• Support both 50G SerDes (PAM4) and 25G SerDes (NRZ) based ports

• Best-in-class packet pacing with sub-nanosecond accuracy

• PCIe Gen4/Gen3 with up to x32 lanes

• RoHS compliant

• ODCC compatible

Cloud and Web 2.0 Environments

Telco, Cloud and Web 2.0 customers developing their platforms on Software Defined Network (SDN) environments are leveraging the Virtual Switching capabilities of the Operating Systems on their servers to enable maximum flexibility in the management and routing protocols of their networks.

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 this, ConnectX-6 offers ASAP2 - Mellanox Accelerated Switch and Packet Processing® technology to offload 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 without 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.

Storage Environments

NVMe storage devices are gaining momentum, offering very fast access to storage media. 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 lowest latency. With its NVMe-oF target and initiator offloads, ConnectX-6 brings further optimization to NVMe-oF, enhancing CPU utilization and scalability.

Security

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. The ConnectX-6 hardware offloads the IEEE AES-XTS encryption/decryption from the CPU, saving latency and CPU utilization. It also guarantees 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 gives 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.

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. As the first adapter card to deliver 200GbE 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.

Mellanox Socket Direct

Mellanox Socket Direct technology improves the performance of dualsocket servers, such as by enabling each of their CPUs to access the network through a dedicated PCIe interface. As the connection from each CPU to the network bypasses the QPI (UPI) and the second CPU, Socket Direct reduces latency and CPU utilization. Moreover, each CPU handles only its own traffic (and not that of the second CPU), thus optimizing CPU utilization even further.

Mellanox Socket Direct also enables GPUDirect® RDMA for all CPU/GPU pairs by ensuring that GPUs are linked to the CPUs closest to the adapter card. Mellanox Socket Direct enables Intel® DDIO optimization on both sockets by creating a direct connection between the sockets and the adapter card.

Mellanox Socket Direct technology is enabled by a main card that houses the ConnectX-6 adapter card and an auxiliary PCIe card bringing in the remaining PCIe lanes. The ConnectX-6 Socket Direct card is installed into two PCIe x16 slots and connected using a 350mm long harness. The two PCIe x16 slots may also be connected to the same CPU. In this case the main advantage of the technology lies in delivering 200GbE to servers with PCIe Gen3-only support.

Please note that when using Mellanox Socket Direct in virtualization or dual-port use cases, some restrictions may apply. For further details, Contact Mellanox Customer Support.

Host Management

Mellanox host management and control capabilities include NC-SI over MCTP over SMBus, and MCTP over PCIe - Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) interface, as well as PLDM for Monitor and Control DSP0248 and PLDM for Firmware Update DSP0267.

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