Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx User Manual
ConnectX®-4 Lx EN Card
Up to 50Gb/s Ethernet Adapter Cards
ADAPTER CARD
PRODUCT BRIEF
†
1/10/25/40/50 Gigabit Ethernet adapter cards supporting RDMA,
Overlay Network Encapsulation/Decapsulation and more
ConnectX-4 Lx EN adapter cards with 1/10/25/40/50 Gb/s Ethernet connectivity addresses virtualized
infrastructure challenges for today’s demanding markets and applications. Providing true hardware-based
I/O isolation with unmatched scalability and efciency, ConnectX-4 Lx EN provides a cost-effective and
exible Ethernet adapter solution for Web 2.0, cloud, data analytics, database, and storage platforms.
With the exponential increase in usage of data and the creation of new applications, the demand for the
highest throughput, lowest latency, virtualization and sophisticated data acceleration engines continues
to rise. ConnectX-4 Lx EN adapter cards enable data centers to leverage leading interconnect adapters for
increasing their operational efciency, improving servers’ utilization, maximizing applications productivity,
while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).
ConnectX-4 Lx EN adapter cards provide a combination of 1, 10, 25, 40, and 50 GbE bandwidth,
sub-microsecond latency and a 75 million packets per second message rate. They include native
hardware support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), Ethernet stateless ofoad engines, Overlay
Networks, GPUDirect® technology and Mellanox Multi-Host® technology.
Mellanox Multi-Host® Technology
Innovative Mellanox Multi-Host technology enables data centers to design and build scale-out
heterogeneous compute and storage racks, with direct connectivity between compute elements and the
network. Signicantly improving cost savings, exibility, and total cost of ownership, Mellanox MultiHost technology provides better power and performance, while achieving maximum data processing and
data transfer at minimum capital and operational expenses.
Mellanox Multi-Host works by allowing multiple hosts to connect into a single interconnect adapter, by
separating the adapter PCIe interface into several independent PCIe interfaces. Each interface connects
to a separate host CPU—with no performance degradation. Reducing data center CAPEX and OPEX,
Mellanox Multi-Host slashes switch port management and power usage by reducing the number of
cables, NICs and switch ports required by four independent servers, from four to one of each. Additional
features & benets of Mellanox Multi-Host technology:
• Enables IT managers to remotely control the conguration and power state of each host individually;
guaranteeing host security and isolation, the management of one host does not affect host trafc
performance nor the management of other hosts.
• Lowering total cost of ownership (TCO), Mellanox Multi-Host uses a single BMC, with independent
NC-SI/MCTP management channels for each of the managed hosts.
• Mellanox Multi-Host also supports a heterogeneous data center architecture; the various hosts connected
to the single adapter can be x86, Power, GPU, Arm or FPGA, thereby removing any limitations in passing
data or communicating between compute elements.
HIGHLIGHTS
FEATURES
– 1/10/25/40/50 Gb/s speeds
– Single and dual-port options
– Virtualization
– Low latency RDMA over Converged
Ethernet (RoCE)
– Mellanox Multi-Host technology connects
up to 4 independent hosts
– CPU offloading of transport operations
– Application offloading
– Mellanox PeerDirect
acceleration
– Hardware offloads for NVGRE, VXLAN
and GENEVE encapsulated traffic
– End-to-end QoS and congestion control
– Hardware-based I/O virtualization
– RoHS compliant
– ODCC compatible
– Various form factors available
BENEFITS
– High performance boards for
applications requiring high bandwidth,
low latency and high message rate
– Industry leading throughput and
latency for Web 2.0, Cloud and Big Data
applications
– Smart interconnect for x86, Power,
ARM, and GPU-based compute and
storage platforms
– Cutting-edge performance in virtualized
overlay networks
– Efficient I/O consolidation, lowering
data center costs and complexity
– Virtualization acceleration
– Power efficiency
®
communication
©2020 Mellanox Technologies. All rights reserved.
†
For illustration only. Actual products may vary.
Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx Ethernet Adapter Card
page 2
Wide Selection of Ethernet Adapter Cards
ConnectX-4 Lx EN adapter cards offer a cost-effective Ethernet adapter
solution for 1, 10, 25, 40 and 50 Gb/s Ethernet speeds, enabling
seamless networking, clustering, or storage. The adapter reduces
application runtime, and offers the exibility and scalability to make
infrastructure run as efciently and productively as possible.
ConnectX-4 Lx Ethernet adapter cards are available in several form factors
including: low-prole stand-up PCIe, OCP 2.0 Type 1, OCP 2.0 Type 2, and
OCP 3.0 small form factor. (See the portfolio on the last page.)
I/O Virtualization
ConnectX-4 Lx EN SR-IOV technology provides dedicated adapter
resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines
(VMs) within the server. I/O virtualization with ConnectX-4 Lx EN gives
data center administrators better server utilization while reducing cost,
power, and cable complexity, allowing more virtual machines and more
tenants on the same hardware.
Overlay Networks
In order to better scale their networks, data center operators often
create overlay networks that carry trafc from individual virtual
machines over logical tunnels in encapsulated formats such as NVGRE
and VXLAN. While this solves network scalability issues, it hides
the TCP packet from the hardware ofoading engines, placing higher
loads on the host CPU. ConnectX-4 Lx EN effectively addresses this by
providing advanced NVGRE, VXLAN and GENEVE hardware ofoading
engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay protocol
headers, enabling the traditional ofoads to be performed on the
encapsulated trafc for these and other tunneling protocols (GENEVE,
MPLS, QinQ, and so on). With ConnectX-4 Lx EN, data center operators
can achieve native performance in the new network architecture.
RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)
Mellanox PeerDirect
Mellanox PeerDirect communication provides high efciency RDMA
access by eliminating unnecessary internal data copies between
components on the PCIe bus (for example, from GPU to CPU), and
therefore signicantly reduces application run time. ConnectX-4 Lx EN
advanced acceleration technology enables higher cluster efciency and
scalability to tens of thousands of nodes.
®
Storage Acceleration
Storage applications will see improved performance with the higher
bandwidth ConnectX-4 Lx EN delivers. Moreover, standard block and
le access protocols can leverage RoCE for high-performance storage
access. A consolidated compute and storage network achieves
signicant cost-performance advantages over multi-fabric networks.
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 Monitoring and
Control DSP0248 and PLDM for Firmware Update DSP0267.
Software Support
All Mellanox adapter cards are supported by Windows, Linux
distributions, VMware, FreeBSD, and Citrix XENServer. ConnectX-4 Lx
EN supports various management interfaces and has a rich set of tools
for conguration and management across operating systems.
Additionally, ConnectX-4 Lx EN provides the option for a secure
rmware update check using digital signatures to prevent remote
attackers from uploading malicious rmware images; this ensures that
only ofcially authentic images produced by Mellanox can be installed,
regardless whether the source of the installation is the host, the
network, or a BMC.
ConnectX-4 Lx EN supports RoCE specications delivering low-latency
and high- performance over Ethernet networks. Leveraging data center
bridging (DCB) capabilities as well as ConnectX-4 Lx EN advanced
congestion control hardware mechanisms, RoCE provides efcient
low-latency RDMA services over Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks.
©2020 Mellanox Technologies. All rights reserved.
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