Cloud Computing Overview

Cloud computing is a convergence of two interdependent IT trends - IT efficiency (reducing operational costs) and business agility (using IT as a competitive advantage). These trends have existed in the IT industry for long time already, but the recent emergence of massive network bandwidth and virtualization technologies has enabled this transformation to a new services-oriented infrastructure. Cloud computing enables IT organizations to increase their hardware utilization and to scale up to massive capacities in an instant without having to invest in new infrastructure or license new software. Cloud computing represents a new tipping point for the value of network computing. It delivers higher efficiency and scalability, and faster and easier software development. It represents new programming models, new IT infrastructure, and the enabling of new business models.

Cloud computing is all about efficiency. It provides a simple way to deploy and access everything from single system to large scale IT resources, on demand, in real time and at an affordable cost. It makes high-performance compute and high-capacity storage available to anyone instantly. Mellanox server and storage interconnect solutions have been designed to deliver the needed networking capabilities of bandwidth, latency and virtualization offloads for the cloud infrastructure. With networking solutions that deliver 56Gb/s throughput, 1us server-to-server or storage latency, and sophisticated I/O virtualization capabilities, Mellanox enables clouds providers to perform system provisioning, workloads migrations, and to support multiple user’s requests faster and in the most efficient way, all while bringing the best ROI for the cloud users.  

The Mellanox Solution

Mellanox adapters, switches, and gateways implement the world’s fastest and most robust network protocol. These capabilities ensure optimum data center performance with:

  • Up to 56Gb/s fabric speed to support servers (or blade servers) and storage connectivity in any configuration.
  • As low as one microsecond application latency leveraging the most efficient remote direct memory access (RDMA) between servers and storage. Mellanox RDMA solutions speed transaction processing by offloading many portions of a transaction from the server CPU and operating system.
  • Lossless transmission, ensuring that no packets are dropped and avoiding retransmissions of data.
  • Multi-protocol bridging – Mellanox BridgeX™ gateways allow for data center fabric consolidation, unifying InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and Ethernet over a most reliable high-speed interconnect.

Key Mellanox Advantages

  • The world’s fastest interconnect, supporting up to 56Gb/s
  • The world’s lowest latency, as low as 1 microsecond
  • CPU offloads with the flexibility of RDMA capabilities.
  • Lossless packet transmission.
  • Multi-protocol bridging for unified data center fabrics