First 40G Ethernet adapter ships

Mellanox Technologies this week shipped a “Goldilocks” network adapter card, one that the company says is the first to run 40G Ethernet.

I say it’s a Goldilocks card because it’s not too fast, not too slow – not as fast as cutting-edge 100G Ethernet and not as slow as the more established 10G Ethernet. The 40G specification has been developed alongside 100G Ethernet in the IEEE, but there has been less buzz around the middling technology. But for some, Mellanox is hoping that it’s just right.

The card, the ConnectX-2 EN 40G, is intended for data center servers and storage systems. Mellanox points out that the speed helps data centers take better advantage of multi-core processors and unify LANs and storage-area networks onto one technology.

Even though the standard for 100G Ethernet and 40G Ethernet is not yet ratified, vendors have been introducing products based on the specifications, arguing that the technical aspects of those specs have been frozen. Juniper a few months ago introduced a 100G Ethernet interface for its router, claiming to be the first in the industry to do so.

As usual, a bump in speed means that users don’t have to try to aggregate slower-speed links. While the full capacity might not be used, it can be worth it to move up to the higher speed to avoid the more complex aggregation.

The adapter supports hardware-based I/O virtualization, including Single Root I/O Virtualization, and Data Center Bridging. It also has T11 Fibre Channel frame encapsulation support and hardware offloads. Software drivers are available for Windows, Linux, VMware and Citrix Xen Server.

Mellanox is demonstrating the card at the Intel Developer Forum this week.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.