Mellanox Technologies has announced software driver support for ConnectX-4 Ethernet and RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) on VMware vSphere.
The new vSphere software for ConnectX-4 delivers three new capabilities; increased Ethernet network speeds at 25/50 and 100Gbps, virtualized application communication over RoCE, and advanced network virtualization and SDN acceleration support.
Benchmarks show that Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) over 25Gbps Ethernet provide more than two times higher efficiency compared to 10Gbps Ethernet. In addition, RoCE improves storage access times by up to ten times, while using 50% less CPU resources compared to traditional transport. Furthermore, the new vSphere release uses the ConnectX-4 offload engines to accelerate VXLAN virtual networks and VXLAN tunnel endpoint (VTEP) gateways.
Mellanox’s ConnectX-4 supports VMware vSphere clouds with Ethernet networks operating at speeds up to 100 Gbps, enabling the compute and storage traffic to run over a single wire. This greatly improves the return on investment of Hyperconverged infrastructure and enables multicore CPUs to achieve their full capacity to run applications, according to the company.
“Adding native RDMA support to VMware vSphere simplifies the deployment and management of Zadara’s VPSATM Storage Array in VMware vSphere,” said Noam Shendar, COO, Zadara Storage.
“Now, with the use of SSDs and RDMA capable of up to 100GbE networking, and combined with our agile as-a-service business model, users can realize improved performance at a reduced cost which, in turn, maximizes their data center efficiency.”