ConnectX-3 Pro, the world’s first interconnect solution with cloud offload engines for overlay networks, allows the formulation of Cloud 2.0

Mellanox Technologies has announced ConnectX-3 Pro, the supercomputing industry’s first network adapter IC and card with hardware offload engines that support virtualized overlay networks commonly used in cloud infrastructures. With hardware offload support for VXLAN and NVGRE, ConnectX-3 Pro enables cloud providers to build large-scale infrastructures with industry-leading performance and dramatically lower CPU overhead, thus reducing cloud application cost and increasing cloud ROI.

Historically, interconnects have limited the scalability of compute and cloud infrastructures, preventing them from supporting ever larger numbers of tenants and applications and from implementing resource mobility within the cloud. As a result, new networking overlay technologies were developed to enable application and tenant scalability and resource tunneling across the cloud. Unfortunately, the use of these technologies has been limited due to the high CPU overhead imposed on cloud resources. Mellanox’s ConnectX-3 Pro implements these overlay technologies within the interconnect hardware itself, allowing clouds to take advantage of virtually unlimited scalability and resource mobility without the CPU overhead.

With ConnectX-3 Pro’s NVGRE and VXLAN hardware offload engines, cloud infrastructures can support more users and more applications while simultaneously reducing applications costs and maximizing ROI. ConnectX-3 Pro is the foundation of a new virtually unlimited cloud infrastructure: Cloud 2.0.

“To meet the growing demand of cloud computing services, cloud providers must be able to take full advantage of new software techniques to scale-up their cloud networks without reducing performance or efficiency of the infrastructure,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “With ConnectX-3 Pro, cloud providers will be able to easily scale and grow their business and provide new value-add services while reducing the cost of their cloud infrastructure; ushering in the age of Cloud 2.0.”

ConnectX-3 Pro is hardware and software compatible with Mellanox’s ConnectX-3 line of FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand and 10 and 40GbE adapters. ConnectX-3 Pro is available today for samples with general availability in May 2013.