April 11, 2008 -- Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of semiconductor-based server and storage interconnect products, announced that its ConnectX EN adapters now support Fibre Channel over lossless Ethernet (FCoE) traffic with priority based flow control (per priority pause) capability.
Designed as an integrated, single-chip platform delivering FCoE functionality, the company says its ConnectX dual-port 10-GbE "converged" NIC can ultimately reduce the number of adapters, cables, and switches in the datacenter, while improving the total bandwidth available. The company says the platform offers the potential to consolidate all of the traffic types over the same Ethernet link.
According to Mellanox, the ConnectX adapter includes support for both TCP/IP stateless offload and Fibre Channel transport in hardware. The FCoE hardware offload includes processing of all CPU intensive FC and SCSI processing tasks as currently available in high performance FC host bus adapters (HBAs), avoiding per-packet processing in software. This functionality improves performance across the entire fabric (i.e. Ethernet and Fibre Channel), delivering significantly higher I/O processor throughput with better CPU utilization and reduced latency for networking, storage and clustering applications.
"Ours is the first adapter to support FCoE hardware offload and priority-based flow control, providing a substantial performance boost while also enabling I/O consolidation over Ethernet in data center environments," contends Eyal Waldman, chairman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. "ConnectX EN enables LAN and FC SAN consolidation over a 10GigE network, and benefits IT managers by enabling a simplified, cost effective data center support and management."
Mellanox is a contributing member of the T-11 FCoE standard initiative and the open source software community supporting Open FCoE. The company's ConnectX EN dual-port FCoE adapters, with support for PCI-Express 2.0, are available with various media interconnect support, including XFP, SFP+, CX4, and 10GBaseT.