BlueField-2 is a highly integrated I/O Processing Unit (IPU) to deliver advanced functionality, unmatched performance and maximum agility for today’s most demanding cloud, security, and storage workloads. The IPU targets I/O-intensive and compute-intensive applications by combining data-plane and control-plane services in one chip.

Software developers can leverage the broad Arm ecosystem and software from the open communities for greater market reach and faster access to business opportunities. Whether employed as a SmartNIC or as an embedded Storage Controller, BlueField-2 brings agile and high-performance solutions for security, cloud, edge computing, and storage applications while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).

Mellanox BlueField-2 Controller Cards leverage all the features of the BlueField-2 IPU in a convenient PCIe standard form factor, making it an ideal controller card for high-powered Storage, Networking, and Security platforms. With an integrated crypto engine, optimized RDMA, and NVMe-oF offload accelerator, BlueField-2 Controller Cards offer a superior performance advantage over existing general purpose servers and network cards, significantly reducing network and storage latency, while increasing throughput and efficiency.

BlueField-2 controller cards supports two ports of 100Gb/s or single-port of 200Gb/s Ethernet or InfiniBand connectivity, 16GB of DDR4 memory, an out-of-band management port for the Arm subsystem, and an integrated 16-lane PCIe Gen 4.0 switch, offering both PCIe endpoint and root complex capabilities. The controller cards can support both a high performance networking and storage traffic data plane as well as a software-defined networking (SDN), storage, and security control plane, making them ideal for building a variety of storage and networking.

The Mellanox BlueField-2 I/O Processing Unit (IPU) is the IC at the heart of software SmartNICs. The 200Gb/s BlueField-2 high-performance and software-programmable networking capabilities enable the SmartNIC to customize and optimize both control plane and data path operations. BlueField-2 programmable SmartNIC delivers isolation, hardware root-of-trust and IPsec and TLS cryptography accelerations, enabling data center security at the endpoint with best-in-class performance, turning zero-trust to hero-trust.

BlueField-2 SmartNIC in bare metal deployments enables cloud providers to provision servers while retaining the ability to control them and deploy policy rules in an isolated and secured manner, totally transparent to the tenant. Mellanox NVMe SNAP™ which logically presents networked storage as a local NVMe drive on the PCIe bus is bringing virtualized storage to bare metal clouds, making composable storage simple, while promoting CAPEX and OPEX savings.

BlueField-2 Reference Platform is a flexible and efficient system designed for customers to evaluate, develop and process sophisticated solutions for Storage, Networking and Machine Learning environments. Capitalizing on smart offload and other advanced capabilities of BlueField-2 IPU, the BlueField-2 Reference Platform delivers extremely low latency and high throughput in a multi-purpose, fully-programmable hardware environment.

The BlueField-2 2U Reference Platform includes an NVMe-ready modular mid-plane and connectivity support for up to 8 hot-swappable 2.5’’ SSDs (SSDs not included) or connectivity of a single GPU device via a PCIe 4.0 x16 interface.