Mellanox Announces Availability of 100Gb/s DAC and AOCs
Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. today announced sample availability for 100Gb/s Direct Attach Copper (DAC) and Active Optical Cables (AOCs) for both EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand and 100 Gigabit Ethernet data center networks. Mellanox will demonstrate 100Gb/s DAC cables of 2, 4, 6 and 8 meter lengths and 100 and 200 meter Active Optical Cables at the Supercomputing 2014 Conference.
“Mellanox is the first and only company to offer plug and play 100Gb/s copper, VCSEL and silicon photonics cables in the QSFP28 form factor,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Our ability to drive 100Gb/s throughput over long distance DAC cables delivers a major cost advantage to our customers and reduces overall data center CAPEX and OPEX. All our cables are designed to make 100Gb/s deployments as simple as 10Gb/s ones.”
Mellanox 100Gb/s Active Optical Cables take advantage of a new generation of ICs which fully integrate multiple 25Gb/s clock and data recovery functions (CDR). At the same time, these ICs dramatically reduce power consumption for the optical engine to far less than 3.5W, the requirement of the small QSFP package.
The new cables are the first 100Gb/s additions to the LinkX comprehensive portfolio of 10, 40, and 56 Gb/s copper and fiber cables, serving both Ethernet and InfiniBand infrastructures. The Mellanox roadmap also includes new cables and transceivers to interconnect 25G and 50G ports with 100G ports.
To ensure that all LinkX cables and transceivers work the first time and every time, Mellanox subjects its products to a full system test in a stressed environment. Network engineers don’t have to waste time debugging a new installation with untested products. With LinkX products, installation experts can bring up new clusters fast, with fewer interconnect problems and higher quality and signal integrity.
All commercial versions of LinkX interconnect products endure full system testing to Bit Error Rate (BER) 10-15 in order to maximize overall data center performance. BER 10-15 provides 1,000X fewer transmission errors than many competing products. Fewer transmission errors translate to fewer retries, higher system performance, and more revenue generating traffic.
