Introduction

Mellanox QM8700/QM8790 switch systems provide the highest performing fabric solution in a 1U form factor by delivering up to 16Tb/s of non-blocking bandwidth with sub 130ns port-to-port latency. These switches deliver 7.2 billion packets-per-second (Bpps), or 390 million pps per port. These systems are the industry's most cost-effective building blocks for embedded systems and storage with a need for low port density systems. Whether looking at price-to-performance or energy-to-performance, these systems offer superior performance, power and space, reducing capital and operating expenses and providing the best return-on-investment.

Powerful servers combined with high-performance storage and applications that use increasingly complex computations are causing data bandwidth requirements to spiral upward. As servers are deployed with next generation processors, High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments and Enterprise Data Centers (EDC) need every last bit of bandwidth delivered with Mellanox's HDR InfiniBand systems.

Built with the latest Mellanox Quantum™ HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand switch device, these standalone systems are an ideal choice for top-of-rack leaf connectivity or for building small to extremely large sized clusters. These systems enable efficient computing with features such as static routing, adaptive routing, and advanced congestion management. These features ensure the maximum effective fabric bandwidth by eliminating congestion. Mellanox Quantum™ is the world's smartest network switch, designed to enable in-network computing through Mellanox Scalable Hierarchical Aggregation Protocol (SHARP)™ technology. SHARP architecture enables the usage of all active data center devices to accelerate the communications frameworks, resulting in order of magnitude applications performance improvements.

Together with the Mellanox ConnectX®-6 adapter card, a Mellanox Quantum switch supports the HDR100 protocol. By utilizing two pairs of two lanes per port, a Mellanox Quantum switch can support up to 80 ports of 100G to create the highest density Top-of-Rack (ToR) switch available in the market. This is a perfect solution for double density racks with more than 40 servers per rack, as it also relieves small-medium deployments from the need to scale to 3-level fat-tree, and provides savings on power, latency and space.

The QM8700, dual-core x86 CPU, comes with an onboard subnet manager, enabling simple, out-of-the-box fabric bring-up for up to 2048 nodes. The QM8700 switch runs the same MLNX-OS® software package as Mellanox FDR and EDR products to deliver complete chassis management of the firmware, power supplies, fans and ports, and ensure interoperability with previous generation systems.

Mellanox's fixed-configuration systems can also be coupled with Mellanox's Unified Fabric Manager (UFM®) software for managing scale-out InfiniBand computing environments. UFM enables data center operators to efficiently provision, monitor and operate the modern data center fabric. UFM boosts application performance and ensures that the fabric is up and running at all times.

InfiniBand systems come as internally or externally managed. Internally managed systems include a CPU that runs the management software (MLNX-OS®) and management ports, which are used to transfer management traffic into the system. Externally managed systems come without the CPU and management ports, and are managed using firmware tools.

QM8700 Front View

QM8790 Front View

QM8700 and QM8790 Rear View

For additional airflow options, see Airflow.

The table below describes maximum throughput and interface speed per system model.

The table below lists the various management interfaces and available replacement parts per system model.

For a full feature list, please refer to the system’s product brief. Go to http://www.mellanox.com. In the main menu, click on Products > InfiniBand/VPI Switch Systems , and select the desired product page.

The list of certifications (such as EMC, Safety and others) per system for different regions of the world is located on the Mellanox website at http://www.mellanox.com/page/environmental_compliance.