Mellanox 40GbE Drivers Integrated in vSphere 5.5

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that its ConnextX-3 40GbE driver has been integrated into vSphere 5.5 to enable a new price/performance record for virtualized data centers.

Benchmark results achieved a sustainable rate of more than 37Gb/s of throughput using servers equipped with ConnectX-3 40GbE NICs connected by SwitchX 40GbE switches and the company’s QSFP+ cables. Compared to 10GbE, the solution increases traffic capacity, allowing four times as many VMs to run on a server, reducing data center complexity, and capital and operation expenses.

Mellanox’s 40GbE solution enables performance for enterprise applications running over vSphere 5.5 using a converged interconnect that delivers both, compute traffic and storage traffic over a single wire. Converging over 40GbE NIC eliminates the need for multiple Gigabit or 10GbE NICs, FC HBAs, switches and cables, simplifies data center infrastructure deployment, and helps IT managers to meet their performance goals at a lower TCO.

"VMware has worked with Mellanox on key I/O virtualization technologies to offer customers innovative server and storage interconnect solutions," said Mike Adams, director, cloud infrastructure product marketing, VMware, Inc. "Mellanox’s 40GbE NIC solutions can improve performance within virtualized deployments and help with greater VM density through higher capacity links, a benefit to vSphere 5.5 customers building highly scalable public and private cloud infrastructures."

Mellanox’s end-to-end 40GbE interconnect solution includes the SwitchX-based SX1036 and SX1024 switches, with performance of 220ns latency and 2.88Tb/s of non-blocking throughput, ConnectX-3 and ConnectX-3 Pro 40GbE NICs to provide greater performance when running enterprise data center applications.

"With the growing demand to deliver faster results to mobile cloud users and the ongoing need to run more applications over a smaller, converged footprint, increasing the number of VMs per server while consolidating the networking infrastructure becomes a critical goal," said Kevin Deierling, VP marketing, Mellanox. "Using Mellanox’s end-to-end 40GbE interconnect solution over vSphere 5.5 allows IT managers to accelerate business applications and reduces infrastructure costs and power, enhancing their competitiveness in the industry."