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Mellanox Technologies
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Introduction
This is the User Guide for Mellanox Innova
™
IPsec adapter card based on the ConnectX®-4 L x
Ethernet (EN) integrated circuit device with an on-board FPGA device.
The Mellanox Innova IPsec EN adapter card provides security acceleration for IPsec-enabled
networks while taking advantage of the ConnectX-4 Lx EN network controller’s best-in-class
performance, unmatched scalability, and efficiency.
The constantly growing demand for security and privacy in modern data centers, private and
public clouds, Web 2.0 infrastructure, and telecommunication systems, requires the use of
security protocols. IPsec is a protocol suite for secure Internet Protocol (IP) communications b y
authenticating and encrypting each IP packet of a communication session. However, the high
computing power required by the IPsec algorithms consumes expensive CPU cycles and limits
network connection performance.
The Mellanox Innova IPsec EN adapter offloads the processing of the IPsec algorithms, frees u p
the CPU, and eases network bottlenecks.
The adapter integrates advanced network capabilities and encryption offloading in one card,
utilizing only a single PCIe slot for both networking and crypto functions.
The Mellanox Innova IPsec EN adapter also brings ConnectX-4 Lx’s industry leading
technologies: hardware support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet, Ethernet stateless offload
engines, overlay networks, GPUDirect® technologies, and more.
This chapter covers the following topics:
• Section 1.1, “Product Overview,” on page 11
• Section 1.2, “Features and Benefits,” on page 12
• Section 1.3, “Block Diagram,” on page 14
•
Section 1.4, “Operating Systems/Distributions,” on page 14
