ConnectX - 4th Generation Server & Storage Adapter Architecture

(View ConnectX Architecture Brief - PDF)

Overview

The ConnectX architecture enables integration of extraordinary levels of functionality into a single adapter chip. It supports eight lane PCI Express v1.1 and v2.0 interfaces as the host interface. For network and storage connectivity, it supports two network ports. Each port can be flexibly configured as either a 4X InfiniBand port or a 10 Gigabit Ethernet XAUI/CX4 or XFI port based on OEM preferences. The InfiniBand port supports Single, Double and Quad Data Rates (SDR, DDR and QDR) delivering 10, 20 and 40Gb/s full duplex bandwidth (40Gb/s products are expected to reach the market in the 2008 timeframe). The network ports support either InfiniBand physical layer semantics or XAUI semantics.

The ConnectX architecture offers the necessary building blocks for designing leading price/performance server and storage connectivity solutions for today and tomorrow. Service oriented I/O ensures scalable and granular quality of service for a converged set of data center applications, in both native operating system and virtualized server environments. Multiple network and storage connectivity options on a single ConnectX adapter enhances the server OEMs target markets and time to market. Finally, end users can use ConnectX-based solutions for incremental and demand-based I/O growth and scaling.

Features

Network Acceleration

• TCP, UDP, IP Checksum Offload
• Large Send Offload
• Receive Side Scaling
• Split header and payload processing
• Multiple send and receive queues
• Interrupt moderation
• PCI Express MSI-X
• Remote DMA
• Reliable and unreliable connected modes
• IB Hardware Transport and TCP/IP Stateless Offload

Quality of Service

• Marking, shaping and queuing (including IEEE 802.1p and DiffServ)
• 8 queues per port– End-to-end congestion control
• Granular flow control

High Availability & Manageability

• IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation / Channel Bonding
• IBA Partitioning and IEEE 802.1q VLAN tagging
• PXE compliant remote boot
• ASF and IPMI pass-through
• Counters for popular MIBSApplication