ENGINEERING

Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro with NVGRE offload simplifies cloud deployments, extends scalability and maximizes application performance in Windows Server Hyper-V based infrastructures

Mellanox Technologies has announced that its ConnectX-3 Pro 10GbE adapter with Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE) offload delivers near line-rate speed in a Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V virtualized environment. The ConnectX-3 Pro is the newest member of Mellanox’s family of 10/40/56GbE adapters. It incorporates hardware offload engines that deliver 65 percent more throughput while reducing the CPU cycles required to transfer data by 80 percent, compared to standard 10GbE NICs. These impressive benchmark results demonstrate that using ConnectX-3 Pro with NVGRE offload enables cloud providers to scale-out virtualized data centers while simultaneously boosting application performance and lowering costs.

“With Windows Server 2012, customers gain innovative technologies such as Hyper-V Network Virtualization,” said Mike Schutz, General Manager, Server and Tools Marketing, Microsoft. “Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro with NVGRE offload builds on the foundation in Windows Server 2012 and helps accelerate throughput, increase cloud providers’ scalability and reduce cost. We are pleased to work with Mellanox to give customers the benefits of network virtualization and SDN.”

ConnectX-3 Pro is the industry’s first network adapter controller with hardware offload engines that support NVGRE, an industry standard used to extend the scale and improve isolation of cloud based infrastructures.

“Using a standards-based tunneling technology like NVGRE for interconnect virtualization is a key component of a successful deployment of Software Defined Networking (SDN) in the cloud,” said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Now, with ConnectX-3 Pro, cloud providers can build secure, large-scale infrastructures with industry-leading performance. Using the embedded hardware offload engines to implement virtual overlay networks dramatically reduces the percentage of CPU consumed by data movement tasks, thereby freeing up cycles to run applications and thus increasing cloud ROI.”

General availability of the ConnectX-3 Pro Software driver for Windows Server 2012 R2 is expected to be in Q3’2013.

Visit Mellanox Technologies at TechEd USA (June 3-6, 2013)

Visit Mellanox Technologies at the TechEd USA Partners Pavilion (booth #316) to see a presentation of our ConnectX-3 Pro with NVGRE hardware engines performance over Windows Server 2012, and the full suite of Mellanox’s end-to-end high-performance Ethernet and InfiniBand data center interconnect products.