Mellanox MCX346A-BCQN ConnectX-3 Pro EN 40Gigabit Ethernet Card

Overview
Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro EN 40 Gigabit Ethernet Network Interface Card (NIC) with PCI Express 3.0 delivers high-bandwidth, low latency and industry-leading Ethernet connectivity for Open Compute Project (OCP) server and storage applications in Web 2.0, Enterprise Data Centers and Cloud infrastructure.

Web2.0, public and private clouds, clustered databases, web infrastructure, and high frequency trading are just a few applications that will achieve significant throughput and latency improvements resulting in faster access, real-time response and more virtual machines hosted per server. ConnectX-3 Pro 40GbE for Open Compute Project (OCP) specification 2.0 improves network performance by increasing available bandwidth while decreasing the associated transport load on the CPU especially in virtualized server environments.

World-Class Ethernet Performance

Virtualized Overlay Networks –

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud demands that data centers host and serve multiple tenants, each with their own isolated network domain over a shared network infrastructure. To achieve maximum efficiency, data center operators create overlay networks that carry traffic from individual Virtual Machines (VMs) in encapsulated formats such as NVGRE and VXLAN over a logical “tunnel,” thereby stretching a virtual layer-2 network over the physical layer-3 network. Overlay Network architecture introduces an additional layer of packet processing at the hypervisor level, adding and removing protocol headers for the encapsulated traffic. The new encapsulation prevents many of the traditional “offloading” capabilities (e.g. checksum, LSO) from being performed at the NIC.

ConnectX-3 Pro EN effectively addresses the increasing demand for an overlay network, enabling superior performance by introducing advanced NVGRE and VXLAN hardware offload engines that allow traditional offloads to be performed on the encapsulated traffic. With ConnectX-3 Pro EN, data center operators can decouple the overlay network layer from the physical NIC performance, thus achieving native performance in the new network architecture.

RDMA over Converged Ethernet –

ConnectX-3 Pro EN utilizing IBTA RoCE technology provides efficient RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) services, delivering low-latency and highperformance to bandwidth and latency sensitive applications. With link-level interoperability in existing Ethernet infrastructure, Network Administrators can leverage existing data center fabric management solutions.

Sockets Acceleration –

Applications utilizing TCP/UDP/IP transport can achieve industry-leading throughput over 40GbE. The hardware-based stateless offload and flow steering engines in ConnectX-3 Pro EN reduce the CPU overhead of IP packet transport, freeing more processor cycles to work on the application. Sockets acceleration software further increases performance for latency sensitive applications.