Mellanox today introduced ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 – next-generation cloud SmartNICs and I/O Processing Unit (IPU) solutions, delivering unprecedented data center security, performance and efficiency at massive scale, for any workload. 
Continuing Mellanox’s innovation in high-performance cloud fabrics, ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 make the impossible possible by introducing cutting-edge hardware acceleration engines and best-in-class software programmability to mission-critical applications. They deliver new levels of security and efficiency with the highest return on investment (ROI) for hyperscale, enterprise, and telco environments.
ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNICs provide up to two ports of 25, 50 or 100Gb/s, or a single port of 200Gb/s, Ethernet connectivity powered by 50Gb/s PAM4 SerDes technology and PCIe 4.0 host connectivity. The ConnectX-6 Dx innovative hardware offload engines include IPsec and TLS inline data-in-motion crypto, advanced network virtualization, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage accelerations.
The BlueField-2 IPU integrates all the advanced capabilities of ConnectX-6 Dx with an array of powerful Arm processor cores, high performance memory interfaces, and flexible processing capabilities in a single System-on-Chip (SoC), supporting both Ethernet and InfiniBand connectivity up to 200Gb/s. BlueField-2 based embedded controllers are ideal for building highly efficient and cost-effective flash storage, security, IoT and edge computing platforms. BlueField-2 based SmartNICs act as a coprocessor that puts a computer in front of the computer to transform bare-metal and virtualized environments using advanced software-defined networking, NVMe SNAP storage disaggregation, and enhanced security capabilities. Furthermore, BlueField-2 delivers unmatched performance and efficiency for AI workloads in the cloud or at the network edge.
“We are excited to introduce the ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 architectures, providing groundbreaking acceleration engines for next-generation cloud data-centers,” said Yael Shenhav, Vice President, Business Ethernet NIC and IPU Business at Mellanox. “Built on the success of our award-winning ConnectX and BlueField product families, ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 set new records in high-performance networking, allowing our customers and partners to build highly secure and efficient compute and storage infrastructures to increase productivity and reduce total cost of ownership.”
“With cloud computing becoming the norm, enterprises increasingly rely on the underlying data-center infrastructures to deploy workloads across public, private and edge domains”, said Baron Fung, Director at Dell’Oro Group. “Hence, there is a growing need for advanced, secure, high performance SmartNICs. This is one of the reasons why we forecast the SmartNIC market to grow at a 40 percent CAGR surpassing $500 million by 2023.”
ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 are uniquely positioned to address the immense cloud security challenges by delivering protection at every data center server, storage, and edge computing endpoint. They also both enable highly efficient hyperscale cloud and SDN/NFV data-centers, with a smooth transition from previous ConnectX and BlueField generations
ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 provide unparalleled RDMA performance over Ethernet and InfiniBand with enhanced programmability and robustness, for accelerating the most demanding workloads at extreme scale. Advanced traffic management innovations enable communications to run seamlessly over ordinary networks, making RoCE the enterprise-grade, easy-to-use, network transport technology of choice.
