Featured

NVIDIA has launched the NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx SmartNIC — a highly secure and efficient 25/50 gigabit per second (Gb/s) Ethernet smart network interface controller (SmartNIC) — to meet surging growth in enterprise and cloud scale-out workloads. ConnectX-6 Lx, the 11th generation product in the ConnectX family, is designed to meet the needs of modern data centers, where 25Gb/s connections are becoming standard for handling demanding workflows, such as enterprise applications, AI and real-time analytics. The new SmartNIC extends accelerated computing by leveraging software-defined, hardware-accelerated engines to offload more security and network processing from CPUs. Advanced Security Accelerated security features such as IPsec in-line cryptography and Hardware Root of Trust, and a 10x performance improvement for Connection Tracking, enable Zero Trust security throughout the data center. Best-in-class RDMA over converged Ethernet (RoCE), advanced virtualisation and containerisation, and NVMe over Fabrics storage offloads provide highly scalable and performant networking. The server industry is rapidly transitioning from 10GbE to 25GbE network speeds with very fast growth expected. With increasing requirements being placed on the network, more offloads need to be performed on SmartNICs. Key Features The Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx provides: Two ports of 25Gb/s, or a single port of 50Gb/s, Ethernet connectivity with PCIe Gen 3.0/4.0 x8 host connectivity Security features including Hardware Root of Trust, Connection Tracking for stateful L4 firewalls, and in-line IPSec cryptography acceleration GPUDirect® RDMA acceleration for NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage, scale-out accelerated computing and high-speed video transfer applications Zero Touch RoCE (ZTR) for scalable, easy-to-deploy, best-in-class RoCE without switch configuration Accelerated switching and packet processing (ASAP2), with built-in SR-IOV and VirtIO hardware offloads for virtualization and containerization, to accelerate software-defined networking and connection tracking for next-generation firewall services ConnectX-6 Lx is sampling now, with general availability expected in Q3 2020. Like all products in the ConnectX […]

The word globalisation has lost its relevance and lustre with the emergence of the new global economy of the 21st century. In fact, it’s become an anachronism. Its deficiency is that it’s not a new concept which creates nuances of confusion. Globalisation describes the international outreach of countries for the purpose of economic, social, political and cultural liaisons. Global linkages between countries through military conquest, colonisation, multilateral free trade agreements and cultural exchange existed in an uninterrupted continuum in the evolving history of humankind. Historically, however, the process of globalisation has taken different forms, and its meaning has changed and mutated since it was first used in English in the 1930s. For lack of a better word, the term received an extension to its lifeline until the end of the 20th century despite the profound structural changes and technological advances that began to take place in the 1980s. Therefore, globalisation has come to be used to represent “modern” 20th century economics and social processes, including the instant exchange of money enabled by internet technologies. Yet because of its varied historical use, it does not truly reflect the electronic and digital empowerment that has been unleashed by the information technology revolution. Therefore, globalisation is not an accurate descriptor of the 21st century and the internet-driven transformational change sweeping the international economic landscape. And so I have coined the term internetisation which I believe should replace the concept of globalisation. Internetisation: Time, geography are irrelevant Internetisation is the contemporary face of globalisation. It includes the modern tools of electronic globalization and embraces the digital connectivity and empowerment of the internet and the World Wide Web. Although we could widen the term globalisation to include internetisation, I believe it is better to replace the word globalisation altogether because the long duration of its […]