MLX-MBF1L516A-CSNAT-00
MPN: MBF1L516A-CSNAT

Mellanox MBF1L516A-CSNAT BlueField SmartNIC VPI 100 GbE Dual-Port PCIe 4.0 x16 Network Adapter


Highlights
Combining Arm® processing power with advanced network and storage offloads to accelerate a multitude of security, networking and storage applications with world-leading performance, flexibility and efficiency.

BlueField SmartNIC features the BlueField system-on-chip (SoC) - an innovative and high-performance programmable networking engine. Providing unmatched scalability and efficiency, the dual-port BlueField SmartNIC is the ideal adapter to accelerate the most demanding workloads in data center, cloud, service provider and storage environments. BlueField SmartNICs comes in different speeds, numbers of CPU cores and PCIe widths-from dual-port 25GbE PCIe Gen4 x8 to dual-port 100GbE PCIe Gen4 x16, supporting 4/8/16 Arm cores.

Powerful & Smart Network Adapter

BlueField SmartNIC adapters accelerate a wide range of applications through flexible data and control plane offloading. Enabling a more efficient use of compute resources, BlueField adapters empower the CPU to focus on running applications rather than on networking or security processing. Additionally, as software-defined adapters, BlueField SmartNICs ensure the ultimate flexibility by adapting to future protocols and features through simple software updates.

BlueField System-on-Chip

BlueField is a Mellanox family of advanced SoC solutions that integrates a coherent mesh of 64-bit Armv8 A72 cores, a ConnectX network adapter front-end and a PCI Express switch into a single chip.

The powerful SoC architecture includes a 64-bit Armv8 multicore processor array and enables customers to develop sophisticated applications and highly differentiated feature sets. BlueField leverages the rich Arm software ecosystem and introduces the ability to offload the x86 software stack.

At the heart of BlueField is the ConnectX-5 network controller with DMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and InfiniBand offload technology, which delivers cutting-edge performance for networking and storage applications such as NVMe over Fabrics. Advanced features include an embedded virtual switch with programmable access lists (ACLs), transport offloads and stateless protocols.

Security Applications

BlueField SmartNIC addresses the concerns of modern data centers by combining hardware encryption accelerators with embedded software and fully integrated advanced network capabilities, making it an ideal platform for developing proprietary security applications.

It enables a distributed security architecture by isolating and protecting each individual workload and providing flexible control and visibility at the server and workload level, controlling risk at the server access layer. BlueField builds security into the DNA of the data center and enables prevention, detection and response to potential threats in real time.

BlueField SmartNIC is capable of delivering powerful functionality, including encryption of data-in-motion, bare metal provisioning, stateful L4 firewall and more.

Networking Applications

BlueField SmartNIC offers a wide range of dedicated offloads to maximize virtualization scalability and efficiency. Data center administrators can benefit from better server utilization, allowing more virtual machines and more tenants on the same hardware, while reducing the TCO, power, and cable complexity.