South Africa's leading value-added distributor, Networks Unlimited, has announced that it has become a distribution partner of Mellanox, the market's highest performing end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnect solutions provider for servers and storage.

Southern African customers will, with immediate effect, have access to the Mellanox product line, which offers the highest throughput and lowest latency of any Ethernet interconnect solution – meaning faster data delivery and better system and application performance.

"Our partnership with Mellanox is in line with our strategy to provide the southern African market with true technology innovation. Mellanox's mature, field-proven product offerings include solutions for I/O, switching, and advanced management software — making it the ideal partner for high-performance computing and data centre connectivity," says Anton Jacobsz, managing director at Networks Unlimited.

Mellanox's RDMA, or Remote Direct Memory Access, feature helps distinguish it from others in the market when it comes to performance. "Very simply, when using the InfiniBand protocol, RDMA allows data to be transferred between computing systems without impacting either of the systems' computational power," adds Syd Virdi, EMEA channel distribution manager at Mellanox. "RoCE, or RDMA over converged Ethernet, essentially brings these performance benefits to the world of Ethernet thus enabling high throughput, low latency networking."

Virdi further points out that the low-latency, high-performance, and efficient CPU utilisation provided by Mellanox Ethernet solutions, coupled with the economic benefits of consolidation, performance boosts, simplified management, and network virtualisation can help southern African end-customers build out their applications in the most cost-effective manner.

"Our offering is fully interoperable with the leading Ethernet vendors and provides southern African customers with an end-to-end solution from one manufacturer. It also offers a simple user interface and familiar CLI, and includes all software features essential for use in datacentres. Our solutions are currently being used by the biggest brands in the world for superior network performance," states Virdi.

Mellanox, established in 1999, makes its own state-of-the art silicon and integrated circuits; this allows significant increases in performance and removes the cost of paying third-party manufacturers. Of significance is that its technology provides customers with 1/10/25/40/50/56 and 100 GbE enabled as standard; non-blocking architecture; lowest latency, jitter-free, zero packet loss operation; low power consumption; reliability, stability and automation; and maximum port density.

Its InfiniBand connectivity has also established itself as the backbone of many financial services trading systems and HPC environments where reliability and performance are critical. Today, Mellanox is the InfiniBand leader with more than 85 percent market share and delivering similar performance gains via Ethernet interconnect solutions.

"We are pleased that with Networks Unlimited's proven experience and reach in the southern African network communication industry, we will now extend our African market and enable customers in this region to take advantage of the real business impact benefits Mellanox offers," concludes Virdi.

Instances where Mellanox solutions have been successfully deployed include high performance computing environments, such as those found in bioscience, engineering design automation, manufacturing (both MCAD and CAE), media entertainment, oil and gas, weather, and financial trading systems industries.

For further information about Mellanox, please contact Morne Delport, Product Manager of Mellanox at Networks Unlimited at +27112028400.