Mellanox Technologies’ network infrastructure now fully integrates with cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure software stacks from vendors including VMware, Nutanix, Red Hat, and Microsoft. This gives service providers and enterprises hyperscaler capabilities — like scalability and reliability — in their own data centers or private clouds, the networking vendor says.

Mellanox leads the high-performance Ethernet network interface card (NIC) market, said Kevin Deierling, VP of marketing. “We have about 70 percent market share at 25G and above,” he said. But to date, it’s really been only the Super 7 tech giants that have the budget and resources to build a 25G, 50G, or even 100G Ethernet network.

“What we’re seeing now is the next tier of service providers, web providers, and even enterprises want 25G or above,” Deierling said. “And people are realizing the public cloud is great, but not every workload should move to the public cloud whether for cost or security or regulation reasons.”

Mellanox's networking products can help these companies achieve hyperscaler capabilities without the cloud giants’ budgets. They use industry-standard hardware and commercial and open-source software, he added.

“It’s taken a while to get our high-performing networks integrated with all of the software partners, but today we can do that across the software ecosystem — Linux, Microsoft, VMware,” Deierling said. “It really doesn’t matter what the customer decides to use as their framework for their private cloud. Our product platform combined with the software integrations means they can enjoy the benefits the hyperscalers get.”

Mellanox calls this its “Hyper-Scalable Enterprise Framework.” It has five elements. And, not surprisingly, No. 1 is the vendors’ suite of 25G, 50G, and 100G adapters, cables, and switches.

The second piece is open networking. An open and fully disaggregated networking platform is key to scalability, flexibility, and operational efficiency, according to Mellanox.

The third is converged networks on an Ethernet storage fabric. This is the single, integrated fabric that supports compute, communications, and storage.

No. 4 is software-defined networking, storage, and virtualization — or software-defined everything — to accelerate virtual networks.

Cloud software integrations round out the framework. To this end, Mellanox’s networking infrastructure fully integrates with cloud platforms including OpenStack, VMware vSphere, and Microsoft Azure Stack. It also supports software-defined storage products such as Ceph, Gluster, Storage Spaces Direct, and VSAN.

At last week’s OpenStack Summit, Mellanox announced its end-to-end networking suite integrations with the Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Also at the Summit, Mellanox, along with its partner Cumulus Networks, announced that Vault Systems, an Australian government-certified cloud service provider, chose Mellanox Ethernet and Cumulus Linux to increase network stability and scalability.

“We’re seeing 25G move beyond a niche and into the mainstream technology,” Deierling said.

It also is “very complementary” to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), he added. As an example, he cited another Mellanox software partner, Nutanix.

“Making the infrastructure invisible is the key message of hyperconvered,” Deierling said. “What’s missing from that is the networking piece: they don’t have a switch that they ship with the solution, and that’s where we come in. We complete that hyperconverged infrastructure and make the network invisible, too. Our platform extends what the HCI guys are doing.”