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 announced sample availability of 100Gb/s direct attach copper (DAC) and active optical cables (AOCs) for both EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand and 100 Gigabit Ethernet data-center networks. Mellanox is demonstrating 100Gb/s DAC cables of 2, 4, 6 and 8m lengths and 100 and 200m active optical cables at Supercomputing 2014 (SC14, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis) in New Orleans (16-21 November).
“Mellanox is the first and only company to offer plug-and-play 100Gb/s copper, VCSEL [vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser] and silicon photonics cables in the QSFP28 form factor,” claims VP of marketing Gilad Shainer. “Our ability to drive 100Gb/s throughput over long-distance DAC cables delivers a major cost advantage to our customers and reduces overall data-center CapEx and OpEx,” he adds. “All our cables are designed to make 100Gb/s deployments as simple as 10Gb/s ones.”
Mellanox 100Gb/s AOCs take advantage of a new generation of ICs that fully integrate multiple 25Gb/s clock & data recovery (CDR) functions. At the same time, these ICs reduce power consumption for the optical engine to far less than 3.5W (the requirement of the small QSFP package).
The new cables are the first 100Gb/s additions to the LinkX portfolio of 10, 40 and 56Gb/s copper and fiber cables, serving both Ethernet and InfiniBand infrastructures. Mellanox’s roadmap also includes new cables and transceivers to interconnect 25G and 50G ports with 100G ports.
Mellanox says that, to ensure that all LinkX cables and transceivers work the first time and every time, it subjects its products to a full system test in a stressed environment. Network engineers do not have to waste time debugging a new installation with untested products, the firm adds. With LinkX products, installation experts can bring up new clusters rapidly, with fewer interconnect problems and higher quality and signal integrity.
To maximize overall data-center performance, all commercial versions of LinkX interconnect products endure full system testing to a bit error rate (BER) of 10-15 (providing 1000x fewer transmission errors than many competing products, it is claimed). Fewer transmission errors translate to fewer re-tries, higher system performance, and more revenue-generating traffic, notes Mellanox.
