24 March 2015

Mellanox launches next-gen 100Gb/s silicon photonics transceivers

Mellanox Technologies Ltd of Sunnyvale, CA, USA and Yokneam, Israel, a supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions and services for data-center servers and storage systems, has introduced three new LinkX 100Gb/s solutions with a live demonstration in booth 2419 at the Optical Fiber Communications conference & exposition (OFC 2015) in Los Angeles (24-26 March).

All LinkX 100Gb/s transceivers and cables support the high-density, low-power, QSFP28 connector-based Switch-IB switch platform. The Switch-IB 36-port 100Gb/s InfiniBand switch delivers 7.2Tb/s of aggregate throughput in a 1U, making it the world's highest-performance, ultra-dense end-to-end platform, it is reckoned. The robustness, density and standard QSFP connectors and cables enables 100Gb/s networks to be as easy to deploy as 10Gb/s, the firm adds.

New LinkX products announced at OFC include the following:

• 100Gb/s silicon photonics transceivers – Mellanox has introduced its 100Gb/s 1550nm parallel single-mode transceiver in the QSFP28 form factor, capable of reaches up to 2km. Using a new generation of LinkX drivers, trans-impedance amplifiers (TIAs) and silicon photonics chips, the low-power transceiver consumes a maximum of 3.5W (2.5x more efficient than most 40G QSFP solutions, it is reckoned). The new transceiver provides data centers with a 2km-reach, high-density, low-cost solution using single mode fiber.

• 100Gb/s VCSEL transceivers – Mellanox has also introduced its 100G vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) transceiver in the QSFP28 form factor with reaches of 100m over multi-mode fiber (MMF). New drivers and TIAs enable a low-power, low-cost solution for existing installations of OM3 or OM4 fiber. The transceiver consumes only 2.0W (maximum) with no re-timing, and 2.8W (maximum) with full retiming.

• 100Gb/s splitters to connect 100G ports to 25G and 50G ports – New copper splitter breakout cables efficiently interconnect 100Gb/s QSFP28 switch ports to a new generation of high-performance servers and storage appliances with 25G and 50G ports. Using zero power, they are the low-power, green solution for connectivity inside the rack, says the firm.

OFC demo features plug & play 100Gb/s LinkX cables and transceivers in end-to-end network using new generation of 7.2Tb/s switches and 100Gb/s adapters

At the core of the OFC demonstration are multiple Mellanox Switch-IB EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand switches that achieve what is claimed to be record port-to-port latency of less than 90ns. Switch-IB has 36-ports of 100Gb/s to provide 7.2Tb/s of switching capacity and ultra-low latency and power consumption. Compared with the previous generation of InfiniBand switches, Switch-IB delivers nearly twice the throughput per port with half the latency.

Also demonstrated are Mellanox's ConnectX-4 100Gb/s interconnect adapters, which deliver 10, 20, 25, 40, 50, 56 and 100Gb/s throughput supporting both the InfiniBand and the Ethernet standard protocols. ConnectX-4 adapters provide the flexibility to connect any CPU architecture, including x86, GPU, POWER, ARM, and FPGA. With what is claimed to be world-class performance at 150 million messages per second, latency of 0.7 μs and smart acceleration engines such as RDMA, GPUDirect and SR-IOV, ConnectX-4 enables the most efficient compute and storage platforms, says Mellanox.

See related items:

Mellanox launches LinkX family of cables and transceivers for data-center infrastructure

Tags: Mellanox AOC QSFP

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