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.
Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx Ethernet Adapter Card
Features*
page 3
Ethernet
– 50GbE / 40GbE / 25GbE / 10GbE /
1GbE
– IEEE 802.3bj, 802.3bm 100 Gigabit
Ethernet
– 25G Ethernet Consortium 25, 50
Gigabit Ethernet
– IEEE 802.3ba 40 Gigabit Ethernet
– IEEE 802.3ae 10 Gigabit Ethernet
– IEEE 802.3az Energy Efcient Ethernet
– IEEE 802.3ap based auto-negotiation
and KR startup
– Proprietary Ethernet protocols
(20/40GBASE-R2, 50GBASE-R4)
– IEEE 802.3ad, 802.1AX Link
Aggregation
– IEEE 802.1Q, 802.1P VLAN tags and
priority
– IEEE 802.1Qau (QCN) – Congestion
Notication
– IEEE 802.1Qaz (ETS)
– IEEE 802.1Qbb (PFC)
– IEEE 802.1Qbg
– IEEE 1588v2
– Jumbo frame support (9.6KB)
Mellanox Multi-Host
– Up to 4 separate PCIe interfaces to
4 independent hosts
– Two PCIe x4 to two hosts, or
four PCIe x4 to four hosts, or
four PCIe x2 to four hosts
– Independent NC-SI SMBus interfaces
– Independent stand-by and wake-on-
LAN signals
Enhanced Features
– Hardware-based reliable transport
– Collective operations ofoads
– Vector collective operations ofoads
– PeerDirect RDMA (aka GPUDirect
communication acceleration)
– 64/66 encoding
– Extended Reliable Connected
transport (XRC)
– Dynamically Connected transport
(DCT)
– Enhanced Atomic operations
– Advanced memory mapping support,
allowing user mode registration and
remapping of memory (UMR)
– On demand paging (ODP) –
registration free RDMA memory
access
CPU Ofoads
– RDMA over Converged Ethernet
(RoCE)
– TCP/UDP/IP stateless ofoad
– LSO, LRO, checksum ofoad
– RSS (can be done on encapsulated
packet), TSS, VLAN insertion/
stripping, Receive ow steering
– Intelligent interrupt coalescence
Overlay Networks
– Stateless ofoads for overlay
networks and tunneling protocols
– Hardware ofoad of encapsulation
and decapsulation of NVGRE and
VXLAN overlay networks
Hardware-Based I/O Virtualization
®
– Single Root IOV
– Multi-function per port
– Address translation and protection
– Multiple queues per virtual machine
– Enhanced QoS for vNICs
– VMware NetQueue support
Virtualization
– SR-IOV: Up to 256 Virtual Functions
– SR-IOV: Up to 8 Physical Functions
per port
– Virtualization hierarchies (e.g. NPAR)
• Virtualizing Physical Functions on a
physical port
• SR-IOV on every Physical Function
– Ingress and egress QoS levels
– Guaranteed QoS for VMs
Protocol Support
– OpenMPI, IBM PE, OSU MPI
(MVAPICH/2), Intel MPI
– Platform MPI, UPC, Open SHMEM
– TCP/UDP, MPLS, VxLAN, NVGRE,
GENEVE
– iSER, NFS RDMA, SMB Direct
– uDAPL
Management and Control
Interfaces
– NC-SI over MCTP over SMBus
and NC-SI over MCTP over PCIe -
Baseboard Management Controller
interface
– SDN management interface for
managing the eSwitch
2
– I
C interface for device control and
conguration
– General Purpose I/O pins
– SPI interface to ash
– JTAG IEEE 1149.1 and IEEE 1149.6
Remote Boot
– Remote boot over Ethernet
– Remote boot over iSCSI
– PXE and UEFI
* This section describes hardware features and capabilities. Please refer to the driver and rmware release notes for feature availability.
Compatibility
PCI Express Interface
– PCIe Gen 3.0 compliant, 1.1 and 2.0 compatible
– 2.5, 5.0, or 8.0GT/s link rate x8
– Auto-negotiates to x8, x4, x2, or x1
– Support for MSI/MSI-X mechanisms
Operating Systems/Distributions*
– RHEL/CentOS
– Windows
– FreeBSD
– VMware
– OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED)
– OpenFabrics Windows Distribution (WinOF-2)
Connectivity
– Interoperable with 1/10/25/40/50 Gb/s Ethernet
switches
– Passive copper cable with ESD protection
– Powered connectors for optical and active cable
support
Standards*
– IEEE 802.3cd, 50,100 and 200 Gb/s
– IEEE 802.3by, 25, 50 Gb/s supporting
all FEC modes
– IEEE 802.3ba 40 Gigabit Ethernet
– IEEE 802.3ae 10 Gigabit Ethernet
©2020 Mellanox Technologies. All rights reserved.
– IEEE 802.3az Energy Efcient Ethernet
(supports only “Fast-Wake” mode)
– IEEE 802.3ap based auto-negotiation
and KR startup
– IEEE 802.3ad, 802.1AX Link
Aggregation
– IEEE 802.1Q, 802.1P VLAN tags and
priority
– IEEE 802.1Qaz (ETS)
– IEEE 802.1Qbb (PFC)
– IEEE 802.1Qbg
– IEEE 1588v2
– 25G/50G Ethernet Consortium “Low
Latency FEC” for 50/100/200GE
PAM4 links
– PCI Express Gen 3.0
Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx Ethernet Adapter Card
Card Portfolio & Ordering Information
Table 1 - PCIe HHL Form Factor
Max Network
Speed
1x 10GbE SFP28 10, 1 PCIe 3.0 x8 MCX4111A-XCAT
2x 10GbE SFP28 10, 1
1x 25GbE SFP28 25, 10, 1
2x 25GbE SFP28 25, 10, 1
1x 40GbE QSFP28 40, 25, 10, 1 PCIe 3.0 x8 MCX4131A-BCAT
1x 50GbE QSFP28 50, 40, 25, 10, 1 PCIe 3.0 x8 MCX4131A-GCAT
Notes: All tall-bracket adapters are shipped with the tall bracket mounted and a short bracket as an accessory.
Dimensions without bracket:
Table 2 - OCP 2.0 Type 1 Form Factor
Max Network
Speed
2x 10GbE SFP28 10, 1 PCIe 3.0 x8 Host Management MCX4421A-XCQN
1x 25GbE
2x 25GbE SFP28 25, 10, 1
1x 50GbE QSFP28 50, 40, 25, 10, 1
Table 3 - OCP 2.0 Type 2 Form Factor
Max Network
Speed
1x 40GbE QSFP28 40, 25, 10, 1 PCIe 3.0 x8 Mellanox Multi-Host,
1x 50GbE QSFP28 50, 40, 25, 10, 1 PCIe 3.0 x8 Mellanox Multi-Host,
Note: OCP2.0 cards are shipped without a bracket.
Interface
Type
Interface
Type
SFP28
Interface
Type
Supported Ethernet
Speeds (GbE)
14.2cm x 6.9cm (low prole)
Supported Ethernet
Speeds (GbE)
25, 10, 1
Supported Ethernet
Speeds (GbE)
Host Interface Additional Features OPN
PCIe 3.0 x8 MCX4121A-XCAT
PCIe 3.0 x8 Host Management, UEFI Enabled MCX4121A-XCHT
PCIe 3.0 x8 MCX4111A-ACAT
PCIe 3.0 x8 UEFI Enabled MCX4111A-ACUT
PCIe 3.0 x8 MCX4121A-ACAT
PCIe 3.0 x8 UEFI Enabled MCX4121A-ACUT
Host Interface Additional Features OPN
PCIe 3.0 x8 MCX4411A-ACAN
PCIe 3.0 x8 Host Management MCX4411A-ACQN
PCIe 3.0 x8 UEFI Enabled MCX4411A-ACUN
PCIe 3.0 x8 MCX4421A-ACAN
PCIe 3.0 x8 UEFI Enabled MCX4421A-ACUN
PCIe 3.0 x8 Host Management MCX4421A-ACQN
PCIe 3.0 x8 Host Management MCX4431A-GCAN
PCIe 3.0 x8 Host Management, UEFI Enabled MCX4431A-GCUN
Host Interface Additional Features OPN
MCX4431M-BCAN
Host Management
MCX4431M-GCAN
Host Management
page 4
†
†
Table 4 - OCP 3.0 Small Form Factor
Max Network
Speed
2x 25GbE SFP28 25, 10, 1 PCIe 3.0 x8 Host Management,
Interface
Type
Supported Ethernet
Speeds (GbE)
Host Interface Additional Features OPN
Thumbscrew bracket
350 Oakmead Parkway, Suite 100, Sunnyvale, CA 94085
Tel: 408-970-3400 • Fax: 408-970-3403
www.mellanox.com
© Copyright 2020. Mellanox Technologies. All rights reserved.
Mellanox, Mellanox logo, ConnectX, CORE-Direct, GPUDirect, Mellanox PeerDirect and ASAP
All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
2
- Accelerated Switch and Packet Processing are registered trademarks of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd.
MCX4621A-ACAB
†
For illustration only. Actual products may vary.
†
53931PB
Rev 2.4
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