Interconnect Solutions Company Advances Its Business — and Customers' — with 64-bit Windows
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Solution OverviewCustomer ProfileMellanox Technologies, based in Santa Clara, California, is a leading supplier of interconnect solutions, including network and channel adapters and switch silicon, that are based on the InfiniBand switched fabric interconnect standard. Business SituationTo ensure its leadership position in the market, Mellanox needed to expand the range of cost-effective 64-bit technologies available to its customers, including hardware manufacturers and systems integrators. SolutionMellanox became an early adopter of Windows 64-bit technology, developing hardware and software drivers to support Windows-based 64-bit computing in the enterprise. Benefits
Software and Services
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Company Overview
Mellanox Technologies develops sophisticated, high-performance interconnect solutions that support the convergence of communication, computing, management, and storage onto a single wire. Responding to the needs of its customers, which include major computer hardware vendors, systems integrators, and solutions providers, Mellanox made a strategic decision to become an early adopter of 64-bit Microsoft Windows technologies. Mellanox has benefited from using Microsoft development tools and can now offer equipment and solutions to major vendors such as Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun. It is also enabling new products from solutions providers who are building powerful yet cost-effective applications to meet specific industry needs.
Business Challenge
Mellanox Technologies is a leading provider of high-performance InfiniBand interconnect solutions used to consolidate communications, computing, management, and storage functions onto a single fabric. The Host Channel Adapter (HCA) silicon and cards and switch silicon products made by Mellanox are based on InfiniBand technology, a switched fabric interconnect standard that is used in server clusters for high-performance computing (HPC) applications and solutions, such as engineering and scientific work, digital media, and enterprise data centers.
Mellanox supplies some of the world's leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and systems integrators, including Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Network Appliance, Sun Microsystems, and others. Its products also provide a platform for providers who create solutions for specific industries.
In the past several years, Mellanox customers have faced increasing demand for high-performance solutions that can handle sophisticated software without the limitations of 32-bit computing—in particular, its 4-gigabit memory limitation. Moreover, enterprises are seeking solutions that can handle the convergence of computing and telecommunications technologies.
To meet these market demands, OEMs and integrators have focused more and more of their technical and business development efforts on cost-effective 64-bit computing. That, in turn, required Mellanox to refocus its own efforts on the next wave of computing standards.
"Convergence in data centers is driving companies worldwide to put in place a cost-sensitive, unified interconnect—including Windows-based solutions—that can support communications, computing, management, and storage," says Eyal Waldman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mellanox. "The combination of Microsoft 64-bit capabilities and Mellanox high-performance InfiniBand products provides customers with leading solutions at the best price/performance."
Solution
To ensure its industry leadership position, Mellanox became an early adopter of 64-bit Microsoft Windows technology. Working closely with Microsoft development teams, Mellanox created a series of products designed to support 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows desktop operating systems, including Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Windows Vista.
Mellanox's Windows-based hardware products and software stack are designed, packaged, and supported to enable OEMs and solutions providers to meet the needs of HPC and enterprise data center (EDC) applications. The company's 64-bit Windows-based products support:
| • | A single software stack that operates across all available InfiniBand devices and configurations. |
| • | HPC environments such as weather analysis, oil and gas exploration, automotive design, and computer benchmarking, as well as "personal supercomputing" capabilities for individuals or small workgroups. |
| • | EDC applications such as cluster databases and financial applications. |
| • | Traditional IP and sockets-based applications, both over TCP/IP as well as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and kernel bypass modes for higher performance, lower CPU utilization, and lower latency. |
| • | High-performance block storage applications using RDMA benefits. |
| • | Subnet management tools. |
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Business Benefits
By creating InfiniBand interconnect solutions based on the Windows 64-bit architecture, Mellanox can meet the cost/performance and ease-of-use requirements of OEMs, systems integrators, and solutions providers. These companies can, in turn, create cost-effective Windows-based HPC computing solutions that are being implemented across a range of industries.
For example, Panta Systems is a Mellanox customer using their 64-bit Windows products to meet the needs of a financial services company, and is benefiting from the combination of high performance and cost-effectiveness associated with 64-bit Windows computing.
In its 64-bit Windows design efforts, Mellanox benefits from a range of Microsoft development tools that provide extensive functionality and frequent updates so that company engineers had the latest technologies to do their jobs. By investing early on in Windows 64-bit technology, Mellanox enhanced its standing as a leading supplier to major hardware vendors and systems integrators.
Low Cost, High Performance
Gilad Shainer, Senior Technical Marketing Manager for Mellanox at its Santa Clara, California headquarters, says providing 64-bit Windows solutions enables Mellanox customers to create powerful yet cost-effective solutions for high-performance computing solutions.
"With the Windows 64-bit architecture, InfiniBand fabric solutions can be used to move computing and storage resources from monolithic systems to service-centric shared pools of resources," he says. "These resources can consist of cost-effective, standardized components that can be dynamically provisioned and accessed through an intelligent network."
One of Mellanox's customers, PANTA Systems, is using Mellanox network adapters for PANTAmatrix, a modular system that supports dynamic configuration of compute nodes with up to 16 processor cores and 128 gigabytes of memory per node.
"We have found that the 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 perform very well on our hardware," says Fred van den Bosch, Chief Executive Officer of Panta. "We are seeing excellent performance results for technical computing and database applications on Windows, and the ease of deployment of Compute Cluster Server is a perfect match for the ease of deployment of our integrated Mellanox InfiniBand-based clustered configurations. Supporting 64-bit Windows and Microsoft applications on PANTAmatrix is an opportunity for us to further our market reach in enterprise data centers."
He says that using hardware designed on the 64-bit Windows platform creates opportunities in markets that are demanding both high performance and lower cost of operation.
"For example, we have a customer in the financial services sector that needs systems capable of doing real-time analysis of market data," Van den Bosch says. "By exploiting the specific benefits of InfiniBand through the Mellanox products, we can handle much higher levels of IP traffic than with Ethernet fabrics. We are seeing single nodes processing over 500,000 multicast frames per second—which is five times more multicast and TCP traffic than Ethernet. Using the operating system bypass capabilities of InfiniBand enables us to do this at much lower levels of CPU utilization than in Ethernet-based fabrics, leaving more processor cycles for the application. The result is that we can achieve more than five times better the price/performance and up to two orders of magnitude lower latency."
Wide Array of Development Tools
To support vendors in creating 64-bit Windows solutions, Microsoft offers a range of tools for designing or porting existing 32-bit solutions to 64-bit versions of hardware and software products. Mellanox uses the Windows Server 2003 Driver Development Kit (Windows DDK) and Software Development Kit (SDK) for designing its 64-bit Windows products.
The Windows DDK is a consolidated driver development kit that provides a build environment, tools, driver samples, and documentation to support driver development for the Windows family of operating systems.
DDK documentation includes topics such as instructions for using the DDK build environment; detailed information about Windows kernel-mode driver architecture; reference material for kernel-mode libraries; and device-specific information about writing drivers for Windows device classes.
"The Microsoft tools available through the DDK and SDK streamline development work," says Shainer.
"For example, we use the tools quite a bit to test code after it is written. Prefast has helped us locate some problems, and WinDbg for debugging. The fact that we can pretty much use the same code for x86/X64 and Windows XP/Windows 2003 and the same environment for the build also saves a lot of resources compared to other development tools."
He says that WinDbg has been particularly valuable.
"It allows us to examine memory dumps, or to perform immediate crush analysis," Shainer says. "Also, when new code is introduced, we can walk through it and find out why things are not working as expected. We had an instance of a bug allocating a buffer in size X and writing more data then its size. This caused memory corruptions. Running WinDbg along with the program helped us spot the problem quickly and look at the variables. This made us understand the problem very easily."
He notes that Mellanox also has a full subscription to MSDN, the Microsoft Developer Network, which allows the Mellanox team to be continually updated with the latest software from Microsoft.
Positioned for Future Growth
Today's data centers need an agile infrastructure that incorporates ongoing improvements in computer, storage, networking, and application technologies, while empowering information technology departments to support changing business processes.
Shainer says creating Mellanox high-performance InfiniBand interconnect products on the Windows 64-bit architecture provides excellent cost/performance and easy-to-use commodity cluster solutions, while opening new markets for HPC scenarios. Performance levels that used to be restricted to supercomputers can now be tapped by departments and workgroups as well as individuals.
"The ease of use of Windows 64-bit combined with Mellanox InfiniBand is helping address the needs for personal supercomputer solutions, providing engineers, scientists, financial analysts, movie editors, and other power users with supercomputing performance in a small form factor," he says. "We believe that Windows Compute Cluster Server will enter into the personal and workgroup HPC segments, which will expand that markets even more and provide additional growth opportunities for Mellanox."
