University of Cambridge partners with Mellanox to deliver OpenStack-Based Cloud

Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd. announced that University of Cambridge (UoC) has selected Mellanox End-to-End Ethernet interconnect solution including Spectrum SN2700 Ethernet switches, ConnectX-4 Lx NICs and LinkX cables for its OpenStack-based scientific research cloud.

This new win has expanded Mellanox’s existing footprint of InfiniBand solution and empowers the UoC to realize its vision of HPC and Cloud convergence through high-speed cloud networks at 25/50/100Gb/s throughput.

“We are witnessing a transformation in the manner in which Research Computing Services are being delivered,” says Dr. Paul Calleja, Deputy Director of Research Computing at the UIS, University of Cambridge. “Research Computing covers a wide remit from scale-out High Performance Computing, large scale High Performance Data Analytics coupled with the delivery of persistent Web-Services, IaaS and cloud-based storage models for researchers across multi-disciplines. To address these challenges, the University is adopting an agile Cloud service model centered around OpenStack. At the University, we see High Performance as a basis for the delivery of all these services in order to drive excellence. Working with Mellanox adds value to the mission as their technology currently allows us to bridge the divide between traditional HPC interconnects with Mellanox Infiniband solutions and High Performance Networking with Mellanox RDMA-capable Ethernet and drive convergence. The University’s expertise and investment in the use of these technologies, together with a collaborative approach adopted by Mellanox to design, has allowed the University to develop an architecture that will lay a foundation for Research Computing.”

“The new generation of analytics-based research, with access to unprecedented volumes of data, coupled with the need to provide quick and secure access to computing and storage resources to the research community in and beyond UoC, have fueled the momentum behind an OpenStack cloud tailor-made for scientific research,” said Chole Jian Ma, Senior Director of Cloud Market Development, Mellanox. “Mellanox Ethernet interconnect solution enables UoC to deploy a high-throughput, low-latency cloud network fabric and leverage advanced offload and acceleration capabilities such as SR-IOV, RDMA, and VXLAN Offload that mitigate virtualization penalties.”

“Mellanox is an important partner of ours and together, we are delivering unparalleled high-speed networking and storage performance to customers like the University of Cambridge. Combining Mellanox Ethernet switches with our software-defined storage enables advanced storage networking and effective storage backend via inline cluster-wide deduplication and compression,” said Oscar Wahlberg, Director of Product Management at Nexenta. “NexentaEdge block and object storage is designed for any petabyte scale, OpenStack or Container-based cloud and was selected to support UoC’s OpenStack-based data research cloud. Our solution supports from 10 up to 100 Gigabit Ethernet and has been verified with Mellanox hardware to scale linearly as the bandwidth increases.”