NVIDIA announced the release of NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx SmartNIC, which provides advanced network offloads to accelerate cloud and enterprise workloads.
SmartNIC was designed to handle the needs of modern data centers by providing 25/50 Gb/s Ethernet smart network connections. It extends accelerated computing by leveraging software-defined, hardware-accelerated engines to offload more security and network processing from CPUs, according to NVIDIA.
It contains two ports of 25Gb/s, or a single port of 50Gb/s, ethernet connectivity with PCIe Gen 3.0/4.0 x8 host connectivity.
“The server industry is rapidly transitioning from 10GbE to 25GbE network speeds with very fast growth expected. With increasing requirements being placed on the network, more offloads need to be performed on SmartNICs,” said Scott Raynovich, the founder and chief technologist of Futuriom, a technology research firm. “NVIDIA’s Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx enables SmartNIC offloads, including advanced switching and security, in a cost-efficient 25/50GbE solution.”
SmartNIC also includes accelerated security features such as IPsec in-line cryptography, Hardware Root of Trust, and a 10x performance improvement for Connection Tracking.
Meanwhile, GPUDirect RDMA acceleration for NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage offers scale-out accelerated computing and high-speed video transfer applications. Accelerated switching and packet processing (ASAP2), with built-in SR-IOV and VirtIO hardware offloads for virtualization and containerization is included to accelerate software-defined networking and connection tracking for next-generation firewall services, according to NVIDIA.
ConnectX-6 Lx is sampling now, and general availability is expected in Q3 2020. It is compatible with the Mellanox SmartNIC software stack.
Additional details are available here.
