Mellanox BlueField SmartNIC User Manual

SMART ADAPTER CARDS

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

BlueField SmartNIC features the BlueField I/O Processing Unit (IPU) — an innovative and high-

performance programmable networking engine. Providing unmatched scalability and efciency, the

dual-port BlueField SmartNIC is the ideal adapter to accelerate the most demanding workloads

in data center, cloud, service provider and storage environments. BlueField SmartNICs comes in
different speeds, numbers of CPU cores and PCIe widths—from dual-port 25GbE PCIe Gen4 x8 to
dual-port 100GbE PCIe Gen4 x16, supporting 4/8/16 Arm cores.

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PRODUCT BRIEF

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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

Powerful & Smart Network Adapter

BlueField SmartNIC adapters accelerate a wide range of applications through exible data and
control plane ofoading. Enabling a more efcient use of compute resources, BlueField adapters

empower the CPU to focus on running applications rather than on networking or security

processing. Additionally, as software-dened adapters, BlueField SmartNICs ensure the ultimate
exibility 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 IPU 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 ofoad the x86 software

stack.

At the heart of BlueField is the ConnectX-5 network controller with DMA over Converged Ethernet
(RoCE) and InniBand ofoad 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 ofoads and stateless protocols.

– Dedicated hardware offload for NVMe-

over-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

©2019 Mellanox Technologies. All rights reserved.

†

For illustration only. Actual products may vary.

Mellanox BlueField Ethernet SmartNIC

page 2

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 exible 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 rewall and more.

Networking Applications

BlueField SmartNIC offers a wide range of dedicated ofoads
to maximize virtualization scalability and efciency. Data center
administrators can benet 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 exible, highly efcient 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) ofoad,

including encapsulation and decapsulation, allows the traditional
ofoads to operate on the tunneled protocols and also ofoad
Network Address Translation (NAT) routing capabilities.

Storage Applications

BlueField SmartNIC may operate as a co-processor ofoading specic
storage tasks from the host, isolating part of the storage media from
the host, or enabling abstraction of software-dened storage logic,
using both a BlueField-dedicated hardware ofoad for NVMe-over­Fabrics and Arm cores.

Mellanox NVMe SNAP

NVMe SNAP (Software-dened 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 efcient 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.

TM

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 rewall.

On the storage initiator side, BlueField SmartNICs can prove an
efcient 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 simplies
the software model, enabling the deployment of multiple OS virtual
machines while the storage application is handled solely by the Arm
Linux subsystem.

©2019 Mellanox Technologies. All rights reserved.