Features and benefits

The Mellanox ConnectX-2 Dual Port 10 GbE Adapter for IBM System x has the following features:

Performance:

Based on ConnectX-2 EN technology, the PCI Express 2.0 x8 adapter provides a high level of throughput performance for all network environments by removing I/O bottlenecks in mainstream servers that are limiting application performance. Servers supporting PCI Express 2.0 with 5 GTps can fully utilize both 10 Gbps ports and achieve up to 40 Gbps duplex bandwidth. Hardware-based stateless offload engines handle the TCP/UDP/IP segmentation, reassembly, and checksum calculations that would otherwise burden the host processor. These offload technologies are fully compatible with Microsoft RSS and NetDMA.

RDMA over Ethernet (RDMAoE) further accelerates application run time. The RDMAoE specification provides efficient data transfer with very low latencies on lossless Ethernet networks. RDMAoE enables lowest latency memory transaction, with less than 2µs at full bandwidth with small message size. This allows very high volume, transaction intensive applications typical of financial market firms and other industries where speed of data delivery is paramount to take advantage. With Mellanox ConnectX-2 Dual Port 10 Gbe Adapter, high frequency transaction applications are able to access trading information with shorter times, making sure the trading servers are able to respond first to any new market data and market inefficiencies, while the higher throughput enables higher volume trading, maximizing liquidity and profitability.

In data mining or web crawl applications, RDMAoE provides the needed boost in performance to search faster by solving the network latency bottleneck associated with I/O cards and the corresponding transport technology in the cloud. Various other applications that benefit from RDMAoE with ConnectX-2 EN include Web 2.0 (Content Delivery Network), Business intelligence, data base transactions and various Cloud computing applications.

Mellanox ConnectX-2 EN low power consumption, less than 3.5W per port, provides customers high bandwidth and low latency at the lowest cost of ownership.

I/O virtualization

ConnectX-2 EN with Virtual Intelligent Queuing (Virtual-IQ) technology provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines within the server. The adapter gives data center managers better server utilization and LAN and SAN unification while reducing cost, power, and cable complexity.

Quality of Service

Resource allocation per application or per virtual machine is provided by the advanced QoS supported by ConnectX-2 EN. Service levels for multiple traffic types can be based on IETF DiffServ or IEEE 802.1p/Q, allowing system administrators to prioritize traffic by application, virtual machine, or protocol.

Specifications

The adapter has the following specifications:

• Low-profile adapter form factor
• Ports: Two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports with SFP+ connectors
• ASIC: Mellanox ConnectX-2 EN
• Cabling types: Direct Attached Copper, SR and LR Fiber Optic
• Host interface: PCI Express 2.0 x8 (5.0 GT/s)
• Features: Stateless Offload, Priority Flow Control
• Power consumption: 6.4 W (typical)

Note: The adapter does not support FCoE.

Ethernet support and standards:

• IEEE Std 802.3ae 10 Gigabit Ethernet
• IEEE Std 802.3ad Link Aggregation and Failover
• IEEE Std 802.3x Pause
• IEEE 802.1Q, .1p VLAN tags and priority
• IEEE P802.1au D2.0 Congestion Notification
• IEEE P802.1az D0.2 Enhanced Transmission Selection
• IEEE P802.1bb D1.0 Priority-based Flow Control
• Multicast
• Jumbo frame support (10KB)
• 128 MAC/VLAN addresses per port

TCP/UDP/IP stateless offload:

• TCP/UDP/IP checksum offload
• TCP Large Send Offload (< 64KB) or Giant Send Offload (64KB-16MB) for segmentation
• Receive Side Scaling (RSS) up to 32 queues
• Line rate packet filtering

Additional CPU offloads:

• RDMA over Ethernet support
• Traffic steering across multiple cores
• Intelligent interrupt coalescence
• Compliant to Microsoft RSS and NetDMA

Hardware-based I/O virtualization:

• Address translation and protection
• Dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation
• Multiple queues per virtual machine
• Hardware switching between guest OSs
• Enhanced QoS for vNICs
• VMware NetQueue support