Mellanox Makes Network Efficiency its Mission
transformingnetworkinfrastructure.com
December 05, 2016 By Maurice Nagle
Several years back, Mellanox entered the Ethernet market. Not an early player in the space, but Mellanox is leaving its mark, “grabbing significant market share by targeting the largest data centers in the world,” explained Vice President of Marketing for Mellanox Kevin Deierling at Editors Day Silicon Valley.
The reason for this initial success is simple, “The largest data centers in the world don’t adapt because they like Mellanox or trying to win some supercomputing contest, they make the choice because of efficiency.” Those utilizing Mellonox get more out of servers, performance and compute functions.
When Mellanox entered the market it did so with its InfiniBand line, and today nine of the top 10 cloud vendors are leveraging the technology. The space has evolved a bit in the few short years Mellanox has been part of the fray, as today Deierling highlighted that nearly 90 percent of network bandwidth is above 10G, noting that 25G is the new 10G.
At the end of the day, selecting 25G is more efficient and cost effective for firms. In purchasing 25G, a company receives more than twice the performance at a price point that is only 40 percent more than 10G. Service providers play a key role today, and in the coming years to determine network norms.
continued to illustrate Mellanox is an end-to-end product company, which go from the servers through the cables, silicon photonics, Ethernet/InfiniBand switches and all the way to the storage. The large breadth of offerings allows a firm the luxury of working with one vendor to put the pieces together, and you know they will play nice.
An accelerated compute virtualization, network virtualization and efficient data movement are three primary differentiators for Mellanox, as Deierling clarified, “the CPU is meant to run applications, not move data.”
Moving forward, aside from Mellanox being neck deep in innovation, it plans to leverage its technical advantages to increase market share. For instance, Deierling referenced optical cables, which were once an enabling function, are now utilized in hyperscale environments. And, Mellanox could not leave well enough alone, as its silicon photonics approach is something to behold. Made up of a “really cheap” leaser left on all the time, “passive wave guides on the silicon guide four beams of ones and zeroes,” then the photon gateway parses the signal (much like Morse code).
If, “10s of thousands of end users want access to a 4GB file, if sent at high speed it would be a disaster,” and the innovative method at hand makes a “trickle” faster than a free-flowing faucet.
Of course, in the enterprise it’s all about performance; couple this demand with enterprise also seeking to join today’s software defined movement, and typically it turns into a Mexican standoff. The result of the software-defined discovery journey is “a transition from purpose built hardware to SDN...for us it’s all about making that efficient. What we do is we basically do NFV, SDN without the performance penalty,” noted Deierling.
Speaking of innovation, it’s a key piece of the level of success Mellanox is experiencing, as major cloud providers like Microsoft are putting RoCE ( RDMA over Converged Ethernet) to work and are seeing very positive results in Azure. Deierling explained, “We invented RoCE, opened it and it became standard…if we hadn’t done it our customer would have made us.” I’d say that says something.
With the level of strain placed on today’s network, it is mission critical to ensure that all resources are leveraged in an effective and efficient way, which is why Mellanox makes total infrastructure efficiency its business. |
