Mellanox Announces FCoE Adapter With Hardware Offload

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that its industry-leading ConnectX EN adapters support Fibre Channel over lossless Ethernet (FCoE) traffic with Priority Based Flow Control (Per Priority Pause).

Designed from the ground up as an integrated single chip solution delivering all FCoE functionality, the ConnectX dual-port 10GigE ‘converged’ NIC can reduce the number of adapters, cables, and switches while improving the total bandwidth available with the potential to consolidate all of the traffic types over the same Ethernet link.

The ConnectX adapter includes
support for both TCP/IP stateless offload and Fibre Channel transport
in hardware. The FCoE hardware offload includes processing of all CPU
intensive FC and SCSI processing tasks as currently available in high
performance FC HBAs, avoiding per-packet processing in software. This
improves performance across the entire fabric (Ethernet and Fibre
Channel) delivering significantly higher IOPs, throughput with better
CPU utilization and reduced latency for networking, storage and
clustering applications.

“Mellanox has once again shown
leadership with the first adapter to support FCoE Hardware Offload and
Priority Based Flow Control providing a substantial performance boost
while also enabling I/O consolidation over Ethernet in Data Center
Environments,” said Eyal Waldman, chairman, president and CEO of
Mellanox Technologies. “ConnectX EN enables LAN and FC SAN
consolidation over a 10GigE network; benefits IT Managers with a
simplified, cost effective datacenter to manage and support.”

Mellanox is an active contributing member in the T-11 FCoE standards initiatives and the open source software community supporting Open-FCoE.org along with other industry leaders.

ConnectX
EN dual-port FCoE adapters, with support for PCI-Express 2.0, are
available today with various media interconnect support including XFP,
SFP+, CX4, and 10GBaseT.

Mellanox
Technologies, Ltd.