Mellanox Introducing SwitchX-2

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced SwitchX-2, a next generation of its switch silicon optimized for Software Defined Networking (SDN).

SwitchX-2 includes capabilities of remote configurable routing
tables, lossless and congestion free networks, efficient control planes,
and SDN-optimized software interfaces. It enables IT managers to
program and centralize their server and storage interconnect management
and reduce their operational expenses by completely virtualizing their
data center network.

According to IDC, the broader SDN/OpenFlow market is expected to see
rapid growth, reaching $2 billion by 2016, a significant portion of
which will be network infrastructure.

SwitchX-2 is based on Mellanox’s leading Virtual Protocol Interconnect
(VPI) technology which allows for simultaneous connection to IB or
Ethernet with integrated gateways to legacy data center and storage
systems.

Utilizing industry-first RDMA-based 56GbE and IB, SwitchX-2 is a fast, scalable SDN switch with 4Tb/s switching capacity
(50% higher than closest competition), low power consumption, 170ns
latency, hardware-based L2/L3 congestion management for efficiency and
hardware-based data error correction for reliability. SwitchX-2’s
feature set enables the creation of larger flat SDN networks with lower
cost and higher performance.

"Software Defined Networking is rapidly emerging as a key
architectural element for next generation cloud, Web 2.0 and scalable
data centers. As a building block for SDN-enabled network
infrastructure, switches with high throughput, low latency and low power
consumption are expected to be instrumental in realizing the goal of
reducing operational expense while enabling data center scalability and
flexibility," said Rohit Mehra, VP, Enterprise and Datacenter Networks, IDC. "Technologies
such as Mellanox SwitchX-2, when built into next-generation data
centers, will enable IT to benefit from the promise of Software Defined
Networking by delivering improved throughput, latency and power, along
with enhanced programmability, automation and control."

"Mellanox’s SwitchX-2 VPI switch leads the industry with the highest
throughout capacity, low latency with nearly zero jitter, as well as
advanced SDN interfaces for control and management," said David Barzilai, VP of marketing at Mellanox. "SDN technology has been a critical component of the IB scalable architecture and has been proven
worldwide in data centers and clusters of tens-of-thousands of servers.
Now, with SwitchX-2, Mellanox provides the most efficient SDN solution
for both IB and Ethernet data centers. Mellanox’s fast, RDMA-based
interconnect technology leads the competition in terms of performance,
SDN technology and ROI advantages it brings to IT and application
managers."