> ConnectX-4 Lx Ethernet adapters

> The ConnectX-4 Lx adapters discussed in this product guide offer a high performance Ethernet adapter solution for Ethernet speeds up to 40 Gb/s, enabling seamless networking, clustering, or storage. The Lx adapters reduce application runtime, and offer the flexibility and scalability to make infrastructure run as efficiently and productively as possible

> ConnectX-4 100 Gb Ethernet / EDR InfiniBand

> ConnectX-4 with Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) offers the highest throughput VPI adapter, supporting EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand and 100Gb/s Ethernet and enabling any standard networking, clustering, or storage to operate seamlessly over any converged network leveraging a consolidated software stack

> I/O Virtualization

> ConnectX-4 SR-IOV technology provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VMs) within the server. I/O virtualization with ConnectX-4 gives data center administrators better server utilization while reducing cost, power, and cable complexity, allowing more Virtual Machines and more tenants on the same hardware

> Overlay Networks

> In order to better scale their networks, data center operators often create overlay networks that carry traffic from individual virtual machines over logical tunnels in encapsulated formats such as NVGRE and VXLAN. While this solves network scalability issues, it hides the TCP packet from the hardware offloading engines, placing higher loads on the host CPU. ConnectX-4 Lx effectively addresses this by providing advanced NVGRE and VXLAN hardware offloading engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay protocol header as well as offloads TCP stateless activities on the encapsulated packet

> RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)

> ConnectX-4 adapters supports RoCE specifications delivering low-latency and high-performance over Ethernet networks. The ConnectX-4 VPI adapter also supports IBTA RDMA (Remote Data Memory Access) for InfiniBand network performance. Leveraging data center bridging (DCB) capabilities as well as ConnectX-4 advanced congestion control hardware mechanisms, RoCE provides efficient low-latency RDMA services over Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks

> Mellanox PeerDirect

> PeerDirect communication provides high efficiency RDMA access by eliminating unnecessary internal data copies between components on the PCIe bus (for example, from GPU to CPU), and therefore significantly reduces application run time. ConnectX-4 advanced acceleration technology enables higher cluster efficiency and scalability to tens of thousands of nodes