Mellanox Technologies boosted its cloud data center play in advance of its sale to Nvidia with its Ethernet Cloud Fabric technology.

The new product is based on Mellanox’s programmable Spectrum-2 switch ASIC, which operates at speeds up to 400 gigabit Ethernet. And it targets cloud providers and large enterprises deploying public and private clouds in their data centers. “Nine of the top 10 hyperscalers use our stuff,” said David Isles, senior director of Ethernet switch products at Mellanox.

Ethernet Cloud Fabric technology supports open Ethernet platforms that disaggregate hardware and software. Spectrum-2 based switches are available with network operating systems including Mellanox Onyx, Cumulus Linux, SONiC, and Linux SwitchDev. It incorporates the vendor’s Ethernet Storage Fabric technology to allow the network to serve as the scale-out data plane for computing, storage, artificial intelligence (AI), and communications traffic.

At 8.33 billion packets per second, Mellanox claims it provides the fastest packet forwarding data plane on the market. It also supports the company’s recently launched What Just Happened network telemetry platform to boost visibility and provide Layer 1-4 context and actionable details on abnormal network behavior.

“Ethernet Cloud Fabric is where we play on the strength of our hardware to provide better visibility, performance, and agility,” Isles said, adding that Spectrum-2 provides more fair and predicable performance than Broadcom’s silicon. “We get asked a lot: ‘Do your switches compare to [Broadcom] Trident or Tomahawk?’ The short answer is we build our switch with more capabilities than the Trident family but with the speed of a Tomahawk.”

He says the agility largely comes from its support for VXLAN overlays including single pass VXLAN routing and bridging. It also supports other overlay protocols including EVPN, VXLAN-GPE, MPLS-over-GRE/UDP, NSH, NVGRE, and MPLS/IPv6-based segment routing.

The new product announcement comes a couple months after fellow chipmaker Nvidia said it will acquire Mellanox for $6.9 billion in a deal that will help Nvidia compete against Intel in the lucrative data center sector.