Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, announced that Mellanox's 25GbE and 100GbE ConnectX-4 EN family of Ethernet adapters has been deployed in the data centers of Alibaba Group, the world's largest online and mobile ecommerce company.

The announcement reflects Mellanox's continued investment in China, aligning on-going technology and product development efforts with key customers.

◆RoCE - RDMA over Converged Ethernet
RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) technology is designed to solve the delay of server-side data processing in network transmission.

RDMA enables network adapters to access the application buffer directly, bypassing the kernel, the CPU, and the protocol stack, so the CPU can perform more useful tasks during the I/O transport. This improves server performance, thus enabling application workloads to be highly scalable with high bandwidth networks.

RDMA (RoCE), based on converged Ethernet, can be implemented on an existing open Ethernet network. With RoCE, there is no need to convert data centers legacy infrastructures, which allows companies to save on capital spending.

RoCE enables introducing RDMA technology seamlessly into an Ethernet data center, which benefits applications by making them more efficient, without requiring massive changes to the current network infrastructure.

◆DPDK - Data Path Development Kit
DPDK provides a simple and complete framework for fast packet processing in data plane applications. The tool set allows developers to rapidly build new prototypes.

The Mellanox open source DPDK software enables industry standard servers and provides the best performance to support large-scale, efficient production deployments of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) solutions such as gateways, load balancers, and enhanced security solutions that help prevent denial of service attacks in the data center.

“This deployment demonstrates our commitment to the China market underscored by the collaboration with Alibaba,” said Amir Prescher, senior vice president of business development, Mellanox Technologies.

“Spurred on by Mellanox's continued strategic investment in the region, China overall is migrating to 25/100G.”