Mellanox Technologies and Microsoft showcased multiple demonstrations of drivers for Mellanox’s end-to-end FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand and 10/40GbE networking solutions, including support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) during the Microsoft BUILD conference. The drivers for the ConnectX family of adapters have been optimized for the developer preview of Windows Server 8 and include provisions for accelerated networking, storage, database, virtualization and clustering applications.

Mellanox’s RDMA networking drivers, supported on InfiniBand and Ethernet, are key components to accelerate and improve performance of Windows Server-based storage using the Server Message Block (SMB) 2.2 protocol. Using the new SMBDirect capability that supports SMB over native RDMA and Mellanox networking solutions, end-users can increase Microsoft SQL Server database performance while reducing capital and operating expenses by consolidating their network infrastructure into a single high-speed network. In addition, end-users can achieve industry-leading, low-latency performance for applications in a virtualized Windows Server Hyper-V-based data center and in cloud based high-performance applications.

“Customers always need performance, scalability and efficiency, which is the goal with the new Windows Server 8-based storage technology working with SMBDirect, Mellanox’s InfiniBand, and RoCE networking capabilities,” said Manlio Vecchiet, Director of Product Management, Windows Server and Virtualization, at Microsoft. “Mellanox’s interconnect adapters’ RDMA and low latency capabilities provide a new tool to help accelerate SQL Server database performance.”

“We are pleased to work with Microsoft to deliver our InfiniBand and Ethernet drivers with Microsoft Windows Server 8 and to enable end-users to leverage the performance benefits from our efficient network interconnects right out of the box,” said David Barzilai, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “The Windows drivers unleash the performance capabilities of our networking solutions and have been extensively tested and optimized to remove bottlenecks to improve application efficiency in converged, clustered and virtualized environments.”