Mellanox’s InfiniBand and 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet interconnect solutions deliver direct performance for virtual machines and enhanced security and isolation for multitenant cloud infrastructure

At VMworld in San Francisco, Mellanox Technologies has announced the availability of Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) drivers for its end-to-end FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand and 10/40GbE solutions over VMware ESXi 5.1. The new drivers, available through Mellanox, enable direct performance for virtual machines (VMs), delivering a sustainable bandwidth rate of up to 48Gb/s of bandwidth to storage per VM and less than 2us for VM-to-VM interconnect latency. The new drivers, combined with Mellanox ConnectX-3 56Gb/s host adapters and SwitchX 56Gb/s switch systems, provide the highest performance and VM density for virtualized and cloud data centers while increasing data center return-on-investment.

Taking advantage of Mellanox’s high-performance interconnect solutions, end-users can operate enterprise applications in virtualized data centers over VMware ESXi 5.1 and achieve similar performance to operating over a native operating systems environment. This enables IT and application managers to accelerate their business performance over a more cost-effective and highly efficient infrastructure.

“Through our continued innovation, Mellanox has become the first company to provide a high-bandwidth, low-latency, end-to-end interconnect solution with SR-IOV over VMware ESXi 5.1,” said Yaron Haviv, vice president of data center solutions at Mellanox Technologies. “IT managers can now deliver uncompromised application performance over a virtualized environment to their users while reducing overhead, simplifying management and maximizing their data center infrastructure return-on-investment.”

Mellanox’s hardware-based I/O virtualization solution over VMware ESXi 5.1 leverages advanced hardware offloads to perform I/O virtualization functions and minimize overhead, allowing more CPU cycles for applications. In addition, hardware-based isolation of VM I/O in a multitenant environment will result in better QoS and enhanced security – all controlled by vCenter through a plug-in module.

Live Demonstration and presentations at VMworld 2012 (August 26th - 29th)

Visit Mellanox Technologies at booth #2029 to see a live demonstration of VMWare ESXi 5.1 running over Mellanox’