Mellanox Demos 3-Microsecond Latency Ethernet for Data Centers

Vendor says its RDMA solution can provide low latency connectors for servers and storage networks.

Although generally speaking what happens in Vegas stays there, we can envision the network gear Mellanox has been demonstrating at Interop this week having a future in Wall Street data centers. The company has been showing its Infiniband-like ConnectX EN 10 gigabit Ethernet adapters running at a port-to-port latency of three microseconds (three millionths of a second). The low latency is enabled through an RDMA transport over Layer2 10GbE networks.

"Enterprise data centers are adopting converged I/O solutions to help reduce costs for power, cooling, IT management and server consolidation," said Michael Kagan, CTO of Mellanox Technologies, in a press release. "Low latency Ethernet with RDMA capability enables end-users to derive tangible performance benefits from their mission-critical, transaction intensive applications while reducing power and consolidating their SAN (FCoE) and LAN (10GbE) traffic on lossless 10 gigabit Ethernet."