Mellanox Introduces SwitchX-2 Software Defined Networking VPI Switch

Mellanox Technologies today announced SwitchX-2, the next generation of its switch silicon optimized for Software Defined Networking (SDN). SwitchX-2 includes advanced capabilities of remote configurable routing tables, lossless and congestion free networks, efficient control planes, and SDN-optimized software interfaces. SwitchX-2 enables IT managers to program and centralize their server and storage interconnect management and dramatically reduce their operational expenses by completely virtualizing their data center network. According to IDC*, the broader SDN/OpenFlow market is expected to see rapid growth, reaching $2 billion by 2016, a significant portion of which will be network infrastructure.

SwitchX-2 is based on Mellanox’s leading Virtual Protocol Interconnect® (VPI) technology which allows for simultaneous connection to InfiniBand or Ethernet with integrated gateways to legacy data center and storage systems. Utilizing industry-first, RDMA-based 56Gb/s Ethernet and InfiniBand, SwitchX-2 is the world’s fastest, most scalable SDN switch with unmatched 4Tb/s switching capacity (50 percent higher than closest competition), the industry’s lowest power consumption, extremely low 170ns latency, hardware-based L2/L3 congestion management for highest efficiency and hardware-based data error correction for highest reliability. SwitchX-2’s advanced feature set enables the creation of larger flat SDN networks with lower cost and higher performance.

“Software Defined Networking is rapidly emerging as a key architectural element for next generation cloud, Web 2.0 and scalable data centers. As a building block for SDN-enabled network infrastructure, switches with high throughput, low latency and low power consumption are expected to be instrumental in realizing the goal of reducing operational expense while enabling data center scalability and flexibility,” said Rohit Mehra, vice president, Enterprise and Datacenter Networks, IDC. “Technologies such as Mellanox SwitchX-2, when built into next-generation data centers, will enable IT to benefit from the promise of Software Defined Networking by delivering improved throughput, latency and power, along with enhanced programmability, automation and control.”

“Mellanox’s SwitchX-2 VPI switch leads the industry with the highest throughout capacity, low latency with nearly zero jitter, as well as advanced SDN interfaces for control and management,” said David Barzilai, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “SDN technology has been a critical component of the InfiniBand scalable architecture and has been proven worldwide in data centers and clusters of tens-of-thousands of servers. Now, with SwitchX-2, Mellanox provides the most efficient SDN solution for both InfiniBand and Ethernet data centers. Mellanox’s fast, RDMA-based interconnect technology leads the competition in terms of performance, SDN technology and return-on-investment advantages it brings to IT and application managers.”