Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, has announced the availability of Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx 10/25 Gigabit Ethernet adapters.

These adapters are distributed in the southern African region by value-added reseller, Networks Unlimited, and are now available on Dell PowerEdge servers. The new Dell PowerEdge 13th generation servers, equipped with ConnectX-4 Lx 25Gb/s Ethernet adapters, deliver significant application efficiency advantages and cost savings for private and hybrid clouds running demanding big data, Web 2.0, cloud, analytics, and storage workloads.

"We are pleased to offer Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx based 10/25 Gb/s Ethernet adapters in our PowerEdge server product line," says Brian Payne, executive director, Dell Server Solutions. "The new Mellanox adapters enable Dell PowerEdge customers to achieve new levels of application and operational efficiency and deliver improved return on investment from their private cloud infrastructure. The advanced virtual network accelerators makes enterprise deployments simpler and more efficient, and supports private clouds with many users while still providing excellent isolation, performance, and service agility."

The ever-increasing flow of data in private and hybrid cloud environments is driving demand for high performance, low latency networks. Dell PowerEdge servers, paired with ConnectX-4 Lx 10/25 GbE based adapters, allow clients to process large quantities of data and deliver real-time analytics and business insights in workload intensive enterprise cloud data centres. ConnectX-4 Lx 25 Gigabit Ethernet Adapters are future proof, and fully backwards compatible with existing 10GbE switches and fiber cabling plant; and thus enable the migration to higher-performance networking, without demanding costly upgrades or incurring additional operating expenses.

Mellanox's ConnectX-4 Lx adapters deliver exceptional data center virtualisation capabilities including overlay network acceleration (VXLAN, NVGRE, Geneve), embedded virtual switch, and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE); enabling application acceleration and network virtualisation at full wire speed. These features allow both hybrid and private cloud environments to achieve the agility and scalability benefits of server and network virtualisation while maintaining bare metal performance and getting the best application efficiency out of expensive CPU, I/O, memory, and storage investments.

Dell PowerEdge servers, equipped with ConnectX-4 Lx based 25GbE adapters, also fast track storage and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), facilitating up to two times higher throughout and up to 85 percent more IOPS for Redhat Ceph, Nexenta Edge, VMware VSAN, and Windows Storage Spaces Direct. Leveraging RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet), the adapters deliver efficient, low latency networks, which supports the new generation of flash storage. This allows the most efficient storage protocols such as SMB Direct, iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER), and NVMe Over Fabrics to be fully exploited; using fewer ports, cables, and switch ports than 10GbE thus saving cost and improving ROI.

"Adoption of the new generation of 25, 50 and 100GbE products is occurring at a much faster pace than previously thought," says Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "Mellanox's 25GbE adapters are designed to be plug-and-play using the same infrastructure as 10GbE so customers can future-proof their networks with unbeatable ROI and price/ performance. For instance, 25Gb/s bandwidth is required to fully utilise the performance of just one NVMe Flash drive for analytics and software defined storage applications. The new 25GbE adapters allow customers to fully utilise the most advanced server and storage platforms and achieve new levels of efficiency."

Adds Anton Jacobsz, MD at Networks Unlimited: "The cloud is a cost effective computing solution in emerging economies, and we seeing an increase in cloud computing technology adoption throughout the African continent. We are pleased to now offer our customers Mellanox's 25GbE adapters to increase the efficacy their businesses."