Mellanox Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Form Partnership

Network performance is one of the biggest issues facing everyone from individual consumers to multinational corporations. Congested networks means slow delivery of the data and services we all rely on. The partnership between Mellanox Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) looks to boost NFV and telco network performance so service providers can deliver their offerings without limitations.

Mellanox Technologies supplies high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems. According to the company the ConnectX-4 Lx Ethernet adapter with Mellanox DPDK Poll Mode Driver (PMD) was able to demonstrate near line rate packet processing performance of 33 million packets per second per 25Gb/s port with zero packet loss. The adapter was running on HPE's ProLiant series of server platforms.

Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies, said, "These groundbreaking performance numbers are achieved through full virtual switch offload on the adapter, resulting in minimal impact on valuable CPU and memory resources, empowering Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platforms to do what they are supposed to do – perform service and application processing, rather than handling packet I/O."

This type of speed and reliability is essential for communication service providers (CSPs) as they deploy new virtual services and solutions. If the network infrastructure doesn't have the data packet processing throughput to ensure the QoS customers can rely on, service providers will not succeed.

Mellonx says ConnectX-4 Lx 25G Ethernet NICs are the ideal choice for NFV and cloud deployment for CSPs so they can improve performance, reliability, efficiency, introduce new innovative service and provide open platforms to avoid the propriety limitations of the past, such as vendor lock in.

The high packet handling performance and low processing overhead is making 25G the best option. Mellanox is part of the 25G Ethernet Consortium that is defining the interoperable 25/50G products. According to Mellanox, the development of products based on the de facto industry standard, 25G, by more than 40 consortium member companies has made it the fastest adopted Ethernet networking speed to date.

"The HPE Telco NFV Infrastructure lab has worked closely with Mellanox to ensure that Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx 25Gb/s running on HPE ProLiant servers will enable our CSP customers to achieve the scale, reliability and efficiency they require of their NFV deployments," said Claus Pedersen, Director of NFV and Telecommunication Segment, HPE Servers.

The move by service providers and network operators away from traditional hardware-based networking to software and virtualization is expanding the growth of the NFV market, which is set to reach $11.6 billion by 2019. The partnership between Mellanox and HPE will capitalize on this growth. With Verizon, AT&T, BT, Orange, Telefonica, Telecom Italia and NTT already using NFV to run some parts of their network architecture, the future is looking good for this segment. 

Edited by Maurice Nagle