Mellanox announced that its ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNIC was now generally available and its BlueField-2 I/O processing unit (IPU) would be available later this year. Mellanox, which is being acquired by Nvidia in a $6.9 billion deal, announced the pair of SmartNICs at VMworld last summer.

ConnectX-6 Dx provides up to two ports of 25, 50, or 100Gb/s, or a single port of 200 Gb/s. The NIC also features integrated IP security and transport layer security protocols, advanced network virtualization, remote direct memory access (RDMA) over converged Ethernet, and non-volatile memory express on fabrics for storage acceleration.

The BlueField-2 combines all of the features of ConnectX-6 Dx with an Arm processor in a single system-on-chip (SOC).

While capable of high-speed connectivity, Kevin Deierling, VP of marketing at Mellanox, says the bigger feature of the two platforms is what they can do for security. He explained that until now security has been largely handled in software, but software isn't perfect.

"As soon as you encrypt the packet headers, if you run IPsec, the entire payload is encrypted and you can no longer steer the traffic to a particular virtual machine or a particular core on the CPU, and we can no longer look inside the packet and run our storage acceleration or our network acceleration or load balancing or connection tracking," Deierling said. "All these fantastic things we've implemented, even basic TCP offloads like checksums get broken as soon as you encrypt the data because everything is just ones and zeros."

Mellanox gets around this by using hardware encryption built into the SmartNIC or IPU.

"By by putting these crypto accelerators inline we decrypt the packet as it comes in and then all of these other accelerators that we have we can use," Deierling said. "If you try to do that in software it just breaks everything."

While ConnectX-6 Dx will see use in standard servers, BlueField-2 can function as a standalone controller doing away with the need for a separate x86-based processor. Deierling said one application for this might be in a storage shelf where the high-speed connectivity enabled by BlueField-2 is far more important.

The BlueField-2 will also be available as a PCI-Express card that can be slotted into a traditional server. Deierling explained that this allows service providers to run their security and storage policies on BlueField-2 while freeing up the x86 processor to handle application workloads.