Rev 1.8
12
Mellanox Technologies
1.2
Features and Benefits
Table 4 - Features
a
PCI Express (PCIe)
Uses PCIe Gen 3.0 (1.1 and 2.0 compatible) through an x8 edge connector up to
8GT/s
10/40 Gigabit
Ethernet
Mellanox adapters comply with the following IEEE 802.3* standards:
– IEEE Std 802.3ba 40 Gigabit Ethernet
– IEEE Std 802.3ae 10 Gigabit Ethernet
– IEEE Std 802.3ad, Link Aggregation
– IEEE Std 802.1Q, 1P VLAN tags and priority
– IEEE Std 802.1Qau Congestion Notification
– IEEE Std 802.1Qbg
– IEEE P802.1Qaz D0.2 ETS
– IEEE P802.1Qbb D1.0 Priority-based Flow Control
Memory
PCI Express - stores and accesses Ethernet fabric connection information and
packet data
SPI - includes two SPI Flash devices:
• one 16MB SPI Flash device (W25Q128FVSIG by WINBOND-NUVOTON)
for ConnectX-4 Lx device
• one 512Mb SPI flash (MT25QL512ABB8E12 by MICRON TECHNOL-
OGY) for the FPGA device
EEPROM - accessible through the I2C-compatible interface. The EEPROM
capacity is 128Kb.
2GByte DDR4 - PC-1600MT/sec Soldered on board
IPsec Offload
The Mellanox Innova IPsec adapter provides offloading of compute intensive
encryption/decryption, which are used by the IPsec protocol. Support for Linux
and Windows IPsec software interfaces ensures native integration with existing
IPsec applications, with no required changes to the user’s software. IPsec
offloading is handled by the combination of the ConnectX-4 Lx network
controller and an on-board FPGA, providing high performance and flexibility for
future enhancements and customizations. The FPGA is connected to the
ConnectX-4 Lx through a ‘bump-in-the-wire’ topology, hence encryption and
decryption are performed inline with the network flow. This results in lower
latency and additional savings of CPU resources compared to other IPsec
protocol solutions, be it through software or alternative accelerators.
Overlay Networks
In order to better scale their networks, data center operators often create overlay
networks that carry traffic from individual virtual machines over logical tunnels
in encapsulated formats such as NVGRE and VXLAN. While this solves network
scalability issues, it hides the TCP packet from the hardware offloading engines,
placing higher loads on the host CPU. The Mellanox Innova IPsec adapter
effectively addresses this by providing advanced NVGRE, VXLAN and
GENEVE hardware offloading engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the
overlay protocol headers, enabling the traditional offloads to be performed on the
encapsulated traffic for these and other tunneling protocols (GENEVE, MPLS,
QinQ, and so on). With the Mellanox Innova IPsec adapter, data center operators
can achieve native performance in the new network architecture.
