Mellanox Ethernet adapter facilitates high performance network solutions at Alibaba
Amir Prescher of Mellanox Technologies
Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end smart interconnect solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, announced that its RDMA over Ethernet (RoCE) 25Gbps ConnectX network adapters have been successfully deployed in Alibaba Infrastructure Services’ production network. Alibaba, one of the online and mobile e-commerce companies, leverages RDMA’s high throughput and low latency to accelerate the performance of a wide range of applications, including its key online services.
“High performance network transport technology is critical for Alibaba to achieve the throughput and latency required by our services. We are excited to collaborate with Mellanox to deploy its RoCE technology into our infrastructure.” said Dennis Cai, chief architect of network infrastructure under Alibaba Infrastructure Services.
“Mellanox has pioneered RoCE technology and is now shipping its 7th generation of RoCE capable ConnectX network adapters,” said Amir Prescher, senior vice president of business development at Mellanox Technologies. “Alibaba’s successful large-scale deployment of ConnectX RoCE adapters confirms again that RoCE is a proven technology to accelerate the most demanding workloads in a cost-effective manner. We are thrilled to work with Alibaba to achieve this.”
RDMA technology provides Remote Direct Memory Access from the memory of one host to the memory of another host without involving the operating system and CPU, therefore boosting network and host performance with low latency, low CPU load and high bandwidth. RoCE is an industry standard protocol which allows all the advantages of RDMA on existing Ethernet infrastructures. RoCE has been a natural choice for deployment of distributed cloud storage customers searching for solutions to take advantage of improved storage media performance and the growth of node storage capacity.
Mellanox ConnectX network adapters include a range of RoCE centric accelerations, enabling best-in-class performance, scalability, stability and ease of use while achieving significant cost savings compared with non-RDMA based solutions. Among these capabilities are:
- Sub 1us point-to-point latency
- Close to zero CPU utilisation at full wire speed
- Scalability to thousands of nodes
- Outstanding performance on all types of fabrics – from lossless to lossy
- Ease of deployment through automation
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