Mellanox Technologies has announced availability of hardware-based network virtualization and storage acceleration solutions for OpenStack-based public and private clouds. Using Mellanox 10/40GbE NICs and switches and the OpenStack Quantum plug-in, customers can deploy an embedded virtual switch (eSwitch) to run virtual machine traffic with bare-metal performance, provide hardened security and QoS, all with simpler management through Software Defined Networking (SDN) and OpenFlow APIs.
Using Mellanox’s eSwitch approach, virtual machines can run with 20X lower messaging latency, consume less CPU resources, and gain native access to hardware offloads and RDMA. In addition, Mellanox provides an OpenStack Storage (Cinder) plug-in that allows users to run storage volume traffic over native RDMA transport, providing 5X faster throughput over standard TCP/IP, while significantly increasing infrastructure efficiency by using less CPU resources.
The open architecture of Mellanox’s OpenStack solution supports integration via an SDN Controller and OpenFlow protocol, or natively into existing cloud management systems offered by cloud operators.
The end-to-end integration can transform OpenStack scalability with efficient service-level abstractions that are powered by distributed fabric intelligence. Mellanox’s OpenStack solution offloads the orchestration platform from the management of individual networking elements, with the end-goal of simplifying operations of large-scale, complex infrastructures. The hardware-based security and isolation features can enable wider adoption of multi-tenant clouds while maintaining user service level agreements (SLA). Mellanox is the first company to incorporate Big Switch Networks’s OpenFlow Indigo-2 open source agent on its adapter card to enable full support of OpenFlow 1.0.
“Our ongoing joint development activities with the OpenStack community have resulted in additional integrated solutions that deliver compelling business value to customers,” said Yaron Haviv, vice president of data center solutions at Mellanox Technologies. “By utilizing Mellanox’s new OpenStack Storage and network virtualization components, customers can increase application performance by up to 5-20X, simplify management, and gain better security and isolation, all within a widely used Open Source cloud infrastructure.”
“Cloud infrastructure managers are looking at new and innovative ways to reduce the overall cost of their cloud solution,” said Rob Sherwood, CTO Controller Technologies at Big Switch. “As long time leaders in the OpenFlow domain and contributors of open source SDN software, we're excited to collaborate with Mellanox to deliver cloud infrastructures extreme application performance at the lowest cost per application.”
For OpenStack technical and support questions please email openstack@mellanox.com.