The upgrade to the HPE composable computing platform provides it with 25GB/s connectivity to its blade servers, and 100 GB/s connectivity to its uplinks.
Kevin Deierling, Mellanox’s vice president of marketing
LAS VEGAS – Many of the companies making announcements at HPE Discover here this week are startups and members of the HPE Complete program, which puts their HPE-validated solutions on HPE’s price list so that customers can purchase them directly from HPE and its channel partners. Mellanox Technologies definitely does not fall into that category, as the veteran interconnect solutions vendor is both well-known and well-established. The company nonetheless is announcing a new partnering relationship with HPE which has the same degree of importance to them as access to HPE and its huge channel has to a startup. Through this relationship, the Mellanox Spectrum Ethernet switch ASIC will power the first HPE Synergy Switch Module supporting native 25, 50, and 100 Gb/s Ethernet connectivity.
“This is a great design win for us – our first major OEM design win,” said Kevin Deierling, Mellanox’s vice president of marketing. “We sell a lot of switches, but they are typically white-boxed or our own branded switches. Having HPE sell our Spectrum switches is really a big deal.”
HPE Synergy is the company’s composable infrastructure platform, which provides fluid pools of networking, storage and compute resources that can be composed and recomposed according to demand. This upgrade to the platform, the SH2200 HPE Synergy Fabric, which is powered by Mellanox’s Spectrum Ethernet switch, lets data centres better analyze data in real-time.
“The key thing here is the 25GB Ethernet, which provides the Synergy Fabric with what is essentially the first 25 GB/s blade, Deierling said. “In addition to providing 25 GB to the server blades, it also provides 100 GB/s connectivity to the uplinks.”
The Spectrum Ethernet switch is aimed at demanding use cases, which benefit from its full line rate, zero packet loss, and ultra-low 300ns latency.
“The workloads that we are focused on with this are in media and entertainment, financial services, cloud and high performance computing,” Deierling said. “These are all use cases which require the super-low latency of these switches.”
Deierling said that this HPE relationship has strong potential to shake up the market segment.
“This market is dominated by Broadcom, but we have significant advances in terms of latency and throughput,” he stated. “We think this switch module will help HPE significantly in that enterprise and telco market which needs this kind of performance to support their analytics.”
Deierling also indicated that this switch is opening up new channel relationships with the solution providers who serve this market, noting that he is meeting with a Tier One Canadian VAR at Discover to discuss working together.
The HPE Synergy compute modules with the Mellanox SH2200 Synergy Switch Module are scheduled to become available in the third quarter of calendar year 2017.
