New Mellanox Onyx Ethernet Network Operating System boosts Devops

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Today Mellanox announced the release of Mellanox Onyx – the industry-leading open and flexible Ethernet Network Operating System for Mellanox Spectrum Open Ethernet switches. Mellanox Onyx succeeds MLNX-OS as a next-generation Ethernet network operating system and is a natural choice for Cloud, Hyperscale, Enterprise, Media & Entertainment, Storage, and high-performance Ethernet-based interconnect applications.

Mellanox Onyx brings leading management, provisioning, automation and network visibility to data centers and cloud infrastructures, to deliver the best scalability, performance and overall return on investment,” said Yael Shenhav, vice president of products at Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox Onyx also offers a mature Layer-3 feature-set, with integrated support for standard Devops tools, allowing customers to run third party containerized applications with complete SDK access. By utilizing Mellanox Onyx’s leading capabilities, our customers can enjoy the benefits of an industry-standard Layer-2 and Layer3 feature-set along with the ability to customize and optimize the network to their specific needs.”

Key Elements of Mellanox Onyx:

  • Rich Layer-3 Feature Set. Mellanox Onyx derives its rich Layer-3 feature set, a foundational part of any modern scale-out Ethernet Datacenter Fabrics, from an industry-proven software stack. The base operating system comes with built-in dynamic routing protocols such as BGP/OSFP without the need to purchase additional licenses. With a robust control plane and 64-way ECMP support, Mellanox Onyx-based platforms can be used to construct large, scale-out L3 fabrics for datacenters.
  • Automation Smarts. In addition to supporting standard DevOps tools like Ansible and Puppet, Mellanox Onyx has smart hooks to automate network provisioning for high performance workloads such as storage and artificial intelligence. For example, RoCE is the preferred transport for artificial intelligence and NVMe-over-Fabrics storage workloads and Mellanox Onyx automates the end-to-end QoS configuration and buffer tuning for RoCE.
  • Container Support. With Mellanox Onyx, customers can run containerized applications on the switch system itself, while having complete access to the silicon SDK and the operating system’s APIs. The container infrastructure allows customer communities and partner ecosystems to innovate and extend the functionality of Mellanox Spectrum Ethernet Switches to Ethernet Storage Fabric, Media and Entertainment and other such solutions.
  • Enhanced Network Visibility. Mellanox Onyx enables buffer and link monitoring that leverage Mellanox Spectrum’s unique silicon level capabilities. The additional telemetry and visibility features can be used to debug congestion and micro-burst issues in large networks. This is especially useful when debugging large networks that support high performance storage and artificial intelligence workloads. Mellanox Onyx is fully integrated with Mellanox NEO network orchestration, visibility, and management platform. Mellanox NEO provides a single pane of glass control and orchestration mechanism for the entire network.

Mellanox Onyx Fabric

Mellanox Onyx is generally available now, and is a complete super-set of MLNX-OS in terms of functionality. Mellanox Onyx is also backward compatible with MLNX-OS.

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