Mellanox ships ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNICs

Mellanox Technologies has begun shipping its ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNICs, in addition to the soon-to-be-released BlueField-2 I/O Processing Units (IPUs)s.

The ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNICs provide up to two ports of 25, 50 or 100Gbps, or a single port of 200Gbps, Ethernet connectivity powered by 50Gbps PAM4 SerDes technology and PCIe 4.0 host connectivity.

Significantly, the new SmartNICs’ hardware offload engines include IPsec and inline TLS data-in-motion cryptography, advanced network virtualization, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage accelerations. ConnectX-6 Dx provides IPsec, TLS, and AES-XTS built-in cryptographic acceleration, and Hardware Root of Trust. In addition to the above capabilities, BlueField-2 adds accelerated key management, integrated Regular Expression (RegEx) pattern detection, secure hash computation, etc.

“Networking and security must converge to achieve consistent and predictable application performance, with all the necessary levels of data privacy, integrity and reliability. This vision is the core foundation on which we designed our ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNIC and BlueField-2 IPU products,” said Amit Krig, senior vice president, Ethernet NIC and IPU Product Line at Mellanox Technologies. “Today we are excited to ship production qualified ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNICs to our hyperscale customers, turning our vision into a reality.”

As an IPU, BlueField-2 provides even more in-hardware security capabilities, including agentless micro-segmentation, advanced malware detection, deep packet inspection and application recognition, that far outperform software-only solutions. Mellanox BlueField IPUs enable the best of both worlds – the speed and flexibility of software-defined solutions, with tighter security, accelerated performance and improved efficiency by processing data in the device hardware at the I/O path.

Michael Kagan, CTO and co-founder of Mellanox Technologies, talks about the next step for SmartNICs and the company’s newly released ConnectX-6 Dx product driven by its own silicon.