Mellanox Delivers First PCI Express® 2.0 20Gb/s InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapters

New Adapters Maximize Data Throughput for Multi-core Server, Storage and Embedded Systems in Virtualized and High-Performance Environments
Intel Developer Forum Fall 2007

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mellanox™ Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ: MLNX) (TASE: MLNX), a leading supplier of semiconductor-based, server and storage interconnect products, today announced the availability of the industry’s highest performing 20Gb/s InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters accelerated by PCI Express® 2.0 with 5GT/s support (PCIe Gen2), doubling the bandwidth to host processors. The dual port ConnectX IB and ConnectX EN adapters deliver the highest data throughput and optimize the total performance of multi-core systems deployed in virtualized data centers and high-performance environments. I/O consolidation of multiple Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel adapters onto a single 20Gb/s InfiniBand or 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter, especially in bladed servers and storage platforms, is a leading value proposition of ConnectX adapters which is increasing adoption in the multi-billion dollar server, storage and embedded interconnect market.

“ConnectX IB and EN adapters with PCIe Gen2 strengthens the leadership position of Mellanox’s interconnect product portfolio by providing the highest possible InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet I/O performance,” said Eyal Waldman, chairman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. “We see the need for ever-increasing I/O performance in order to balance computing and storage platforms that use powerful multi-core CPUs and sophisticated memory subsystems tuned for optimal performance. Our PCIe Gen2 adapters address this performance need and enable data centers to reduce infrastructure power, cooling, footprint and total cost of ownership through I/O consolidation and virtualization.”

Enterprise vertical applications, such as customer relationship management, database, financial services, insurance services, retail, virtualization, and web services are demanding the leading I/O performance offered by ConnectX adapters to optimize data center productivity. High performance applications such as bioscience and drug research, data mining, digital rendering, electronic design automation, fluid dynamics, and weather analysis are ideal for ConnectX adapters as they require the highest throughput to support the I/O requirements of multiple processes that each require access to large datasets to compute and storage results.

“PCI Express and Mellanox adapters continue to keep pace with each other, ensuring optimal performance in Intel-based servers with PCI Express 2.0 technology,” said Jim Pappas, Director of Technology Initiatives for Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group. “We have been working closely with Mellanox on the validation to ensure seamless compatibility and maximum performance in these systems.”

ConnectX IB InfiniBand Adapters: Superior Clustering and Enterprise Performance

The dual port 20Gb/s ConnectX IB InfiniBand adapter with PCIe Gen2 maximizes server and storage I/O throughput to deliver the highest application performance.

Leading MPI performance1: PCIe Gen2 enables 1850MB/s uni-directional and 3650MB/s bi-directional MPI throughput over a single 20Gb/s InfiniBand port which is approximately a 30% increase over platforms that only support PCI Express 1.1 (PCIe Gen1). Two active 20Gb/s InfiniBand ports saturate the total PCIe Gen2 x8 interface with over 5500MB/s of bi-directional bandwidth (a 100% increase over PCIe Gen1 platforms). Latency for MPI message transfers is reduced up to 25%.

Highest throughput for TCP/IP applications2: PCIe Gen2 enables an industry-leading 15.6Gb/s of TCP/IP throughput over a single 20Gb/s InfiniBand port delivering the highest I/O performance for any IP-based application while seamlessly running on InfiniBand.

ConnectX EN Ethernet Adapters: The Only True Dual 10+10Gb/s Performance

The dual-port ConnectX EN Ethernet adapter with PCIe Gen2 provides line-rate 10Gb/s bandwidth over two ports either independently or trunked using 802.3ad link aggregation to create a 20 Gigabit Ethernet connection. The ConnectX EN 10GigE products are supported with standard Microsoft Windows, Linux and other popular operating system TCP/IP and iSCSI protocol stacks. Host-resident TCP/IP support under Linux enables the open source community to stand behind the protocol stack implementation, and any code updates can be quickly supported.

Availability

Dual port ConnectX IB and ConnectX EN IC single-chip devices and adapter cards supporting the high-speed PCI Express 2.0 x8 interface (backward compatible to PCI Express 1.1) are available today. Adapter cards are available with all popular copper (IB and CX4) and fiber media interfaces (10GBase-SR/LR/LRM).

Visit Mellanox Technologies at the Intel Developer Forum, San Francisco – September 18-20, 2007

Visit the Mellanox booth (#737) at IDF to see live demonstrations of the ConnectX performance on PCI Express 2.0 servers in addition to Mellanox’s full line of leading InfiniBand and Ethernet connectivity products.

About Mellanox

Mellanox Technologies is a leading supplier of semiconductor-based, high-performance, InfiniBand and Ethernet connectivity products that facilitate data transmission between servers, communications infrastructure equipment and storage systems. The company’s products are an integral part of a total solution focused on computing, storage and communication applications used in enterprise data centers, high-performance computing and embedded systems.

Founded in 1999, Mellanox Technologies is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and Yokneam, Israel. For more information, visit Mellanox at www.mellanox.com.

1. RDMA performance data was measured with MVAPICH 0.9.9 MPI on the
Intel(R) dual quad-core PCI Gen2 platform.

2. IPoIB performance data was measured with iPERF on the Intel(R) dual
quad-core PCI Express Gen2 platform.