Mellanox to Demo 40GbE Networking Card at IDF

Ten Gigabit Ethernet is finding its way into data centers, and networking vendors are already talking about their plans for 100GbE capabilities.

On Monday, Mellanox is unveiling what officials there are calling the industry’s first 40GbE adapter card.

Mellanox’s ConnectX-2 EN 40G is aimed at enabling enterprises to take better advantage of such technologies as virtualization and multicore processors coming from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, and to give them the networking tools needed for cloud computing, converged storage environments and I/O consolidation, officials said.

Mellanox will demonstrate the new adapter card at the Intel Developer Forum, which runs Sept. 22-24 in San Francisco.

Data centers are beginning to make the transition away from Gigabit Ethernet to 10GbE, which analyst firm Dell’Oro Group said in August would be a key driver in the rebound in the Ethernet market. Fueling the demand for 10GbE are such trends as the rapid growth of video traffic, Web 2.0 workloads and virtualization in the data center.

In addition, vendors such as Juniper Networks and Alcatel-Lucent are beginning to talk about 100GbE, unveiling interface cards.

Mellanox’s 40GbE adapter card, which is available immediately, supports I/O virtualization—including SR-IOV (single root I/O virtualization)—and the move to converged networks through DCB (data center bridging). There also is FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) capabilities via T11 Fibre Channel frame encapsulation, and a QSFP connector can be used with copper or fiber optic cables.

Mellanox’s ConnectX-2 EN 40G also comes with drivers to support Windows from Microsoft, a variety of Linux distributions, and virtualization technologies from VMware and Citrix Systems.