Leveraging the momentum it has achieved with 40 Gbps InfiniBand, Mellanox Technologies is entering the network gateway business. Today the company introduced BridgeX, a technology that offers fabric convergence for SAN and LAN infrastructure in multi-protocol datacenters.

In a nutshell, BridgeX is a silicon device that consolidates gateway communication for InfiniBand, Ethernet and Fibre Channel fabrics. The concept is the same as for the company’s ConnectX-based adapter products: use a single piece of silicon to handle multiple network protocols. The BridgeX chip is meant to be incorporated into gateway hardware — bridges or switch blade modules — that can carry Ethernet or Fibre Channel traffic over lossless 40 Gbps InfiniBand or 10GbE fabrics. The goal is for BridgeX-equipped gateways to reduce network infrastructure complexity and cost by replacing multiple switches and bridges that handle only single protocols.

Each BridgeX chip has the capacity to manage two 40 Gbps InfiniBand or six 10GbE uplinks and deliver a combination of up to six 10GbE ports and up to eight 2/4/8Gb Fibre Channel ports on the downlink side. The exact mix of downlink ports for Fibre Channel and Ethernet can be configured dynamically, enabling a good deal of flexibility as datacenter resources grow or get moved around.

Since Ethernet is available on both the uplink and downlink sides, some of the downlink ports can serve as a 10GbE pass-through. For InfiniBand bridging, there appears to be no pass-through capability. So if InfiniBand-based storage needs to be accessed, that traffic would have to be routed through an external switch or adapter connected directly to a server.

The silicon can be used to build two flavors of gateways — 40 Gbps InfiniBand or 10GbE. The former enables Gigabit Ethernet, 10GbE, and Fibre Channel traffic to run over an InfiniBand network, while the latter version can be used for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) bridging.

Mellanox itself is launching its own InfiniBand bridge product line, the BX4000 series, which incorporates both types of gateways (may be configured for either InfiniBand or Ethernet as the convergence fabric). A BX4010 gateway contains a single BridgeX chip, while the BX4020 contains two bridge chips, enabling four 40Gbps InfiniBand or 12 10GbE uplinks and the corresponding number of downlinks. Multiple boxes can be stacked if even denser bridging is required.

Mellanox’s foray into building network boxes is relatively recent. While mainly known for offering switch silicon (InfiniScale) and network adapter cards (ConnectX, InfiniHost), six to nine months ago the company quietly launched its own line of InfiniBand switches — the MTX36xx series. Now with the BX4000 boxes, Mellanox seems intent on expanding its ecosystem footprint even further.

At the same time, Mellanox will be offering BridgeX silicon on the open market for other OEMs to incorporate into gateway boxes. Although no partners were announced at the product launch, Mellanox is in discussion with both InfiniBand and Ethernet vendors looking to support unified fabric environments.

The initial deployments of BridgeX will likely be for InfiniBand setups, especially since Mellanox is offering its own InfiniBand bridge capability in the BX4000. This could be a big deal in the high performance computing space, since a lot of storage is attached to InfiniBand clusters via Ethernet. Fibre Channel is basically a no-show in HPC, but to the extent InfiniBand is used in commercial enterprises, this technology could offer a cost-effective solution for connecting legacy storage and Ethernet LANs with InfiniBand-based clusters.

Since InfiniBand is much less widespread than either of the other two protocols, the larger market for BridgeX is for Ethernet to Fibre Channel gateways. Conveniently, the FCoE standard is expected to be ratified this year just as the 10GbE ecosystem should be shifting into high gear. It remains to be seen if traditional Ethernet vendors like Cisco and Brocade will be tempted by BridgeX or if their smaller rivals will see the Mellanox technology as a way to gain a competitive edge in the FCoE market.

According to Gilad Shainer, director of technical marketing at Mellanox, most of the bridge solutions on the market today rely on a big powerful CPU inside a server, along with a lot of management software. Bridges implemented with this model perform protocol termination at the uplink side and initiate the new protocol on the downlink end.

“The problem is that this entails very complex management, is very low performance, and is very pricey,” says Shainer. “Because of those limitations, some of the gateways never managed to gain much traction in the market.”

The BridgeX approach encapsulates most of the gateway functionality into application-specific silicon. The chip uses a model in which the gateway functions are implemented using simple packet relays, without maintaining any stateful information. And since the device only consumes around 14 watts, the network consolidation can be especially energy-efficient.

The BridgeX silicon devices are available for less than $500 (presumably in quantity), while the BX4000 line of gateway systems start at $9,995. Both are available now.