NVIDIA ConnectX-5 EX 100Gigabit Ethernet Card

Intelligent RDMA-enabled, single and dual-port network adapter with advanced application offload capabilities for Web 2.0, Cloud, Storage, and Telco platforms

ConnectX-5 Ethernet adapter cards provide high performance and flexible solutions with up to two ports of 100GbE connectivity, 750ns latency, up to 200 million messages per second (Mpps), and a recordsetting 197Mpps when running an open source Data Path Development Kit (DPDK) PCIe (Gen 4.0). For storage workloads, ConnectX-5 delivers a range of innovative accelerations, such as Signature Handover (T10-DIF) in hardware, an embedded PCIe Switch, and NVMe over Fabric target offloads. ConnectX-5 adapter cards also bring advanced Open vSwitch offloads to telecommunications and cloud data centers to drive extremely high packet rates and throughput with reduced CPU resource consumption, thus boosting data center infrastructure efficiency.

ConnectX-5 adapter cards are available for PCIe Gen 3.0 and Gen 4.0 servers and provide support for 1, 10, 25, 40, 50 and 100 GbE speeds in stand-up PCIe cards, OCP 2.0, and OCP 3.0 form factors. ConnectX-5 cards also offer advanced Mellanox Multi-Host® and Mellanox Socket Direct® technologies.

Cloud and Web 2.0 Environments

ConnectX-5 adapter cards enable data center administrators to benefit from better server utilization and reduced costs, power usage, and cable complexity, allowing for more virtual appliances, virtual machines (VMs) and tenants to co-exist on the same hardware.

Supported vSwitch/vRouter offload functions include:

• Overlay Networks (e.g., VXLAN, NVGRE, MPLS, GENEVE, and NSH) header encapsulation & decapsulation.
• Stateless offloads of inner packets and packet headers' re-write, enabling NAT functionality and more.
• Flexible and programmable parser and match-action tables, which enable hardware offloads for future protocols.
• SR-IOV technology, providing dedicated adapter resources, guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VMs) within the server.
• Network Function Virtualization (NFV), enabling a VM to be used as a virtual appliance. The full datapath operation offloads, hairpin hardware capability and service chaining enables data to be handled by the virtual appliance, with minimum CPU utilization.