Mellanox Supports InfiniBand RoCE

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced the company’s line of 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet adapters will support the InfiniBand Trade Association‘s recently announced specification aimed at furthering deployment of high-performance and low-latency applications in the enterprise data center: Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE). RoCE brings the low-latency and efficiency benefits of InfiniBand to the data center Ethernet fabric, and holds the promise to bring the benefits of low latency to a significantly wider class of data center and cloud applications.

Low-latency is a key characteristic of clusters made out of commodity x86 servers – delivering higher transactions per second, and enabling high clustering efficiency, both leading to higher ROI and competitive advantage for organizations. This has been proven in high-performance computing, data warehousing, financial applications and increasingly in cloud deployments where clusters play a key role in delivering elasticity. IBTA based technologies have played a key role in advancing these markets and applications. RoCE brings those low-latency and efficiency benefits to the data center Ethernet fabric. RoCE utilizes loss less Ethernet enhancements, such as those being delivered by the work of the IEEE DCB (Data Center Bridging) Work Group to deliver superior latency and quality or service while reducing the cost and power consumption in Ethernet adapters by enabling simpler, purpose-built RDMA implementations in hardware.

"The growth of Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) applications, and elastic compute and storage clusters for cloud computing are making low-latency Ethernet a key requirement for data centers," said Sujal Das, senior director of product management. "We look forward to delivering to the market new RoCE-based adapter products that will allow these classes of data center and cloud applications to deliver significantly higher jobs per second and ROI using the Ethernet fabric."