Mellanox Annouces Citrix Support

SANTA CLARA, Calif. and YOKNEAM, Israel -- Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ:MLNX) (TASE:MLNX), a leading supplier of semiconductor-based, server and storage interconnect products, today announced that drivers for its ConnectX™ EN 10GigE NIC adapters are now included with Citrix XenServer™ 4.1, enabling plug-and-play integration of NIC adapters that boost I/O performance for virtual machines (VMs) while enabling I/O consolidation. ConnectX EN 10GigE NIC adapters offer leading-edge I/O virtualization features such as support for hardware-assisted direct guest access, VM-to-VM switching, advanced memory management, filtering, QoS and receive side scaling. These features improve overall server utilization, especially in multi-core CPU environments.

Mellanox’s advanced virtualization features are compatible with and complement PCI Single Root I/O Virtualization and AMD-V and Intel-VT features to deliver advanced, secure and granular levels of I/O services to applications running in VMs. LAN and iSCSI SAN (storage area network) traffic can both be consolidated over the same 10GigE NIC, and in the future, FC SAN connectivity will be enabled using the emerging FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) standard.

By leveraging the ConnectX EN Linux device driver, integration with the Citrix XenServer 4.1 I/O framework was easily achieved, accelerating time to market significantly without compromising stability. The currently supported paravirtualized I/O solution delivers performance that will enable IT managers to replace 5 or more GigE NICs (depending on application usage) with a single 10GigE adapter. Future hardware I/O virtualization features will continue to deliver higher levels of features and performance, ensuring future-proofing for OEMs and end-users that deploy ConnectX EN with Citrix XenServer 4.1 today.

“Citrix delivers an end-to-end virtualization solution with Citrix XenServer, XenApp and XenDesktop,” said Phil Montgomery, Senior Director, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems. “Usage scenarios including dynamic provisioning of workloads, storage virtualization and consolidation place more demands on server input/output. We are pleased to include support for Mellanox’s ConnectX EN 10GigE NIC in XenServer 4.1, making it easier for users to improve throughput and performance in a seamless fashion.”

Mellanox Technologies Ltd.