Mellanox Pulls a Russkie and Demonstrates a Pre-Standard Low Latency Ethernet Technology
In 1939 Winston Churchill said, "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest." In my case, I wanted to substitute "Russia" with "Mellanox" when I heard about its latest technology announcement regarding low latency Ethernet.
Mellanox already has great line of Infiniband products at competitive prices that should allow it to aggressively compete and win in corporate data centers with its current inventory. So does Mellanox take full advantage of the current economic environment and begin to aggressively market and demonstrate the advantages and cost savings that enterprises can realize from using Infiniband? Of course not, that would be too logical. Instead it pulls a Russkie on me and announces earlier this week a pre-standard Low-Latency Ethernet (LLE) with RDMA technology that it eventually plans to support on its ConnectX EN 10 Gb Ethernet adapter cards.
To a certain degree, I can't entirely blame Mellanox for innovating more in the 10 Gb Ethernet space. The war between 20, 40 and even 80 Gb Infiniband and 10 Gb Ethernet was fought and won by 10 Gb Ethernet last year with nary a shot fired by Mellanox and its companions in the Infiniband space. Why? Maybe it was the Cisco marketing machine. Maybe it was end-user's familiarity with Ethernet. Maybe it was better management tools for Ethernet. Maybe it was some combination of all of the above. In any case, Infiniband never stood a chance through every time I spoke to data center managers about it, their interest was piqued and they immediately began to investigate using Infiniband in their shops.
Regardless, the time for Mellanox to reach a wider audience with its Infiniband products has probably come and gone. Now it finds itself in the somewhat unenviable position of needing to compete in the Ethernet space where it is just one of many players instead of the go-to player in the Infiniband space. So in order to garner some mindshare and assume a thought leadership role in the growing 10 Gb Data Center Ethernet (DCE) space, it introduces LLE.
On the surface, LLE sounds pretty compelling when compared to other competing Ethernet networking technologies like TCP and iWarp. Both TCP and iWarp have larger packet headers when compared to LLE so they require more processing power when handling packets while delivering a smaller payload when their headers are processed. Further, since LLE is low-latency, the amount of time between the start and completion of a transaction is minimal which is critical for mission-critical, transaction intensive applications.
The bad news is that LLE is still a ways away from becoming prime time. Not only is LLE pre-standard (which means no data center in their right mind will use this for anything other than testing), it is a pre-standard implementation of an Ethernet protocol from someone other than Cisco. Granted, Mellanox is only demonstrating the technology right now but even when it does become available, LLE will only work when all of the servers and storage in the network use the Mellanox ConnectX EN 10 Gb Ethernet adapters so this technology is anything but a sure bet for Mellanox.
So what's the upside? (i.e. - why does Mellanox think it can deliver successfully deliver LLE that eventually becomes the standard?) The big advantage that Mellanox has is that it does know a little bit about low-latency networks due to its large presence in the Infiniband space. Because it has such large implementations in the high performance computing space which heavily relies upon Infiniband's low latency features, I'm sure Mellanox has learned a trick or two along the way about how to optimize low latency traffic on any network, be it Infiniband or Ethernet. Those lessons and experience may serve it well as it looks to gain a foothold in data center where experience, stability and reliability still mean something.
Mellanox is an Ethernet veteran and has provided high-end quality products in the Ethernet space for years but it is obvious when talking to Mellanox that its real passion is Infiniband. However right now Mellanox has its own self-interests at heart and is currently putting a greater focus on how it can be better perceived as a leader in the emerging DCE space in corporate data centers. So even though its LLE is still pre-standard and not one that I would recommend to any data center without some serious internal justification, Mellanox's experience with low latency networks in the Infiniband space gives it a solid leg up on its competitors and an above average chance of seeing its pre-standard implementation of LLE turn into the foundation for LLE in the not too distant future.
Mellanox already has great line of Infiniband products at competitive prices that should allow it to aggressively compete and win in corporate data centers with its current inventory. So does Mellanox take full advantage of the current economic environment and begin to aggressively market and demonstrate the advantages and cost savings that enterprises can realize from using Infiniband? Of course not, that would be too logical. Instead it pulls a Russkie on me and announces earlier this week a pre-standard Low-Latency Ethernet (LLE) with RDMA technology that it eventually plans to support on its ConnectX EN 10 Gb Ethernet adapter cards.
To a certain degree, I can't entirely blame Mellanox for innovating more in the 10 Gb Ethernet space. The war between 20, 40 and even 80 Gb Infiniband and 10 Gb Ethernet was fought and won by 10 Gb Ethernet last year with nary a shot fired by Mellanox and its companions in the Infiniband space. Why? Maybe it was the Cisco marketing machine. Maybe it was end-user's familiarity with Ethernet. Maybe it was better management tools for Ethernet. Maybe it was some combination of all of the above. In any case, Infiniband never stood a chance through every time I spoke to data center managers about it, their interest was piqued and they immediately began to investigate using Infiniband in their shops.
Regardless, the time for Mellanox to reach a wider audience with its Infiniband products has probably come and gone. Now it finds itself in the somewhat unenviable position of needing to compete in the Ethernet space where it is just one of many players instead of the go-to player in the Infiniband space. So in order to garner some mindshare and assume a thought leadership role in the growing 10 Gb Data Center Ethernet (DCE) space, it introduces LLE.
On the surface, LLE sounds pretty compelling when compared to other competing Ethernet networking technologies like TCP and iWarp. Both TCP and iWarp have larger packet headers when compared to LLE so they require more processing power when handling packets while delivering a smaller payload when their headers are processed. Further, since LLE is low-latency, the amount of time between the start and completion of a transaction is minimal which is critical for mission-critical, transaction intensive applications.
The bad news is that LLE is still a ways away from becoming prime time. Not only is LLE pre-standard (which means no data center in their right mind will use this for anything other than testing), it is a pre-standard implementation of an Ethernet protocol from someone other than Cisco. Granted, Mellanox is only demonstrating the technology right now but even when it does become available, LLE will only work when all of the servers and storage in the network use the Mellanox ConnectX EN 10 Gb Ethernet adapters so this technology is anything but a sure bet for Mellanox.
So what's the upside? (i.e. - why does Mellanox think it can deliver successfully deliver LLE that eventually becomes the standard?) The big advantage that Mellanox has is that it does know a little bit about low-latency networks due to its large presence in the Infiniband space. Because it has such large implementations in the high performance computing space which heavily relies upon Infiniband's low latency features, I'm sure Mellanox has learned a trick or two along the way about how to optimize low latency traffic on any network, be it Infiniband or Ethernet. Those lessons and experience may serve it well as it looks to gain a foothold in data center where experience, stability and reliability still mean something.
Mellanox is an Ethernet veteran and has provided high-end quality products in the Ethernet space for years but it is obvious when talking to Mellanox that its real passion is Infiniband. However right now Mellanox has its own self-interests at heart and is currently putting a greater focus on how it can be better perceived as a leader in the emerging DCE space in corporate data centers. So even though its LLE is still pre-standard and not one that I would recommend to any data center without some serious internal justification, Mellanox's experience with low latency networks in the Infiniband space gives it a solid leg up on its competitors and an above average chance of seeing its pre-standard implementation of LLE turn into the foundation for LLE in the not too distant future.
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Note that Myricom been doing less than 3us latency over Ethernet since 2006. The implementation is different but the ideas are the same...
For instance, see http://www.myri.com/Myri-10G/documentation/Low_Latency_Ethernet.pdf