Mellanox Introduces Open Composable Networks for OCP Platforms

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openswitchToday Mellanox unveiled its next-generation Open Composable Networks (OCN) platform at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit. OCN delivers ground-breaking open network platforms for enterprises and service providers to unlock performance and unleash innovation with predictable application performance and the efficiency of Web-Scale IT.

Mellanox is showcasing OCN with a live demo of end-to-end 10/25, 50, 100 Gb/s network composed of LinkX cables, the new ConnectX-4 Lx based OCP adapter cards, and the flagship Spectrum Ethernet switches capable of running multiple network operating systems (NOS) and applications, including Cumulus Linux, OpenSwitch, Metaswitch IP Routing, and Mellanox MLNX-OS, running on open software interfaces such as OCP Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) and Linux Switchdev.

“The networking industry is going through a paradigm shift, with traditional network architectures being disrupted by a wave of low-cost, interoperable, open standards- based white box solutions,” said Steve Saunders, CEO and Founder of Light Reading. “Mellanox Open Composable Networks is a great example of a genuinely disruptive white box network architecture that embraces network disaggregation, functional abstraction, and automated resource orchestration as core design principles.”

IT infrastructure has become the critical foundation to guarantee service quality, power agile innovation and provide competitive differentiation. Successful businesses embrace open platforms and automation to enable customizing their IT infrastructure on demand and achieve faster time to market, flexibility and optimal application performance. Network disaggregation is moving beyond the hyper-scale and cloud service providers, and empowering enterprises to take control and easily customize their own network infrastructure to support ephemeral cloud-native workloads, often packaged in containers, and DevOps practices to achieve Web-Scale IT efficiency.

The OCP SAI is critical for meeting the industry’s urgent demand for more open, agile, and efficient solutions” said Jon Berger, vice president of software engineering for Metaswitch Networks. “Demonstrating interoperability with technology leaders, such as Mellanox, clearly establishes Metaswitch as being at the forefront of this shift to open networking.”

Once networks are disaggregated into functional independent modules with open, clearly defined abstraction interfaces, you are free to leverage the best of breed building blocks to compose an infrastructure that is tailored to best serve your applications’ unique requirements. Only with this new generation of Open Composable Networks, can you maximize and leverage the combined wisdom of the larger networking ecosystem, to unleash your own innovation.

Mellanox OCN platforms truly sets you free for agile innovation delivering:

  • Best of breed Open Ethernet networking portfolio available at both the chip and system level. Mellanox is the first to deliver end-to-end 25/50/100 Gb/s Ethernet solutions to unlock infrastructure and application performance. The portfolio includes Spectrum switches, ConnectX adapters, and LinkX cables.
  • Open, industry-standard APIs that are the foundation for resource abstraction and orchestration so that resources can be composed and recomposed on demand to achieve business agility. Specifically, Mellanox has been a key contributor to the development open networking initiatives including OCP ONIE and SAI, and Linux switchdev, where Spectrum is the first switch supported upstream in Linux
  • Simple yet powerful network management and control middleware. The Mellanox NEO management package enables network automation and software defined intelligence. Through integration with other cloud management platforms and Software Defined Networking (SDN) controllers, NEO helps to enhance network operational efficiency, and make network infrastructure easy to deploy, manage, and scale.

Running OpenSwitch as the open source network operating system for Mellanox’s new OCP platform opens the door for unbound innovation and agility for IT designers and administrators,” said Mark Atwood, Community Director, OpenSwitch. “In addition to better control of their networks through disaggregation and the freedom of avoiding vendor lock-in, OpenSwitch enables a faster time to service and lower overall ownership costs compared to traditional solutions. Additionally, we welcome Mellanox as the newest member of the growing OpenSwitch community and look forward to future contributions to both the operating system and incorporation into future product designs.”

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