ConnectX®-3 Pro VPI adapter card, dual-port QSFP, FDR IB (5

Virtualized overlay networks

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud demands that data centers host and serve multiple tenants, each with their own isolated network domain over a shared network infrastructure. To achieve maximum efficiency, data center operators are creating overlay networks that carry traffic from individual Virtual Machines (VMs) in encapsulated formats such as NVGRE and VXLAN over a logical "tunnel, " thereby decoupling the workload's location from its network address. Overlay Network architecture introduces an additional layer of packet processing at the hypervisor level, adding and removing protocol headers for the encapsulated traffic. The new encapsulation prevents many of the traditional "offloading" capabilities (e.g. checksum, TSO) from being performed at the NIC. ConnectX-3 Pro effectively addresses the increasing demand for an overlay network, enabling superior performance by introducing advanced NVGRE and VXLAN hardware offload engines that enable the traditional offloads to be performed on the encapsulated traffic. With ConnectX-3 Pro, data center operators can decouple the overlay network layer from the physical NIC performance, thus achieving native performance in the new network architecture.

I/O Virtualization

ConnectX-3 Pro SR-IOV technology provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VMs) within the server. I/O virtualization with ConnectX-3 Pro gives data center managers better server utilization while reducing cost, power, and cable complexity.

RDMA over Converged Ethernet

ConnectX-3 Pro utilizing IBTA RoCE technology delivers similar low-latency and highperformance over Ethernet networks. Leveraging Data Center Bridging capabilities, RoCE provides efficient low latency RDMA services over Layer 2 Ethernet. With link-level interoperability in existing Ethernet infrastructure, Network Administrators can leverage existing data center fabric management solutions.

Sockets Acceleration

Applications utilizing TCP/UDP/IP transport can achieve industryleading throughput over 10/40/56GbE. The hardware-based stateless offload engines in ConnectX-3 Pro reduce the CPU overhead of IP packet transport. Socket acceleration software further increases performance for latency sensitive applications.