†

For illustration only. Actual products may vary.

The Mellanox BF1500/BF1600 BlueField Dual Port 100Gb/s Controller Card is the perfect solution for

managing NVMe storage drives in storage and hyperconverged systems. BlueField Dual Port 100Gb/s

Controller Card delivers the highest NVMe-oF target performance, reducing TCO and increasing ROI.

Boosting Storage Performance

Three main trends are driving today’s storage OEM market. OEMs seek innovative, scalable and cost-

effective storage solution designs. In addition storage companies strive to extend product lifetimes and

reduce TCO by reusing existing designs. Finally, storage vendors turn to NVMe-oF based solutions as these

provide storage scalability and easy migration to the cloud.

Mellanox is a leading provider of NVMe-oF network adapters. Mellanox was rst to market with 25, 40,

50, and 100 GbE adapters, and is leading the fth generation Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)

products, which are at the base of NVMe-oF technology. By deploying Mellanox BF1500/BF1600 Controller

Cards, customers are taking advantage of Mellanox’s vast and proven success in RoCE and NVMe-oF

deployments.

BlueField Data Processing Unit (DPU)

Mellanox BlueField is a highly efcient controller optimized for NVMe storage systems, Network Functions

Virtualization (NFV), cloud and AI workloads.

Ideal solution for JBOF and JBOD systems

BlueField DPU integrates all the discrete components of a storage system appliance into a single chip

(CPU, PCIe switch, and network controller), making it the premier solution for building Just-a-Bunch-Of-

Flash (JBOF) systems, All-Flash-Array and storage appliances for NVMe over Fabrics.

With an integrated NVMe-oF ofoad accelerator, the BlueField DPU gives the BF1500/BF1600 Controller

Card a superior performance advantage over existing JBOF systems, signicantly reducing storage

transaction latency, while increasing IOPs (I/O operations per second).

Key Benets

BF1500/BF1600 Controller Cards are standard PCIe cards that can transform existing JBOF systems into

NVMe-oF compliant solutions, simply by plugging the cards into PCIe slots. BF1500 supports up to 16 lanes

PCIe Gen3.0/4.0 and BF1600 supports up to 32 PCIe Gen3.0/4.0 lanes. While BF1600 enables connectivity for

up to 16 SSD drives without the need for an external PCIe switch. The BF1500 must be connected through a

PCIe switch to SSD devices. The small form factor of the cards allows customers to install multiple BlueField

Controller Cards in a single system to support a larger number of SSDs as well as high-availability storage

architecture.

Bringing advanced application offload capabilities to high-performance

storage and cloud platforms

BF1500/BF1600

NVIDIA

Mellanox

BlueField

Dual Port 100Gb/s Controller Cards

PRODUCT BRIEF

– Increases ROI by leveraging the NVMe-oF

accelerator to maximize performance

– Enables a shorter time to market

– Reduces TCO by replacing both CPU and

adapter with a single BlueField Dual Port

100Gb/s Controller Card

– Supports up to 16 NVMe SSDs without

requiring an external PCIe switch (BF1600

only)

– Can be used as a GPU controller card for

Machine Learning systems

– Two QSFP ports supporting:

• 10/25/40/50/100 GbE

• EDR/FDR InfiniBand speeds

– Integrated BlueField DPU

– SPI flash for NIC firmware

– 16GB eMMC flash memory for software

– FH¾L or FHHL standard PCIe Gen3.0/4.0

x16

– Expandable to PCIe Gen3.0 x32 (BF1600

only)

BENEFITS

†

CONTROLLER CARD

FEATURES

Mellanox, Mellanox logo, BlueField and BlueOS are registered trademarks of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

350 Oakmead Parkway, Suite 100, Sunnyvale, CA 94085

Tel: 408-970-3400 • Fax: 408-970-3403

www.mellanox.com

Mellanox BlueField BF1500/BF1600 Dual Port 100Gb/s Controller Card

page 2

BF1500/BF1600 Controller Cards offers a wide range of dedicated ofoads

to maximize virtualization scalability and efciency, via a powerful blend

of hardware accelerators, embedded software and fully integrated

advanced network capabilities.

The integration of crypto engines within the BlueField BF1500/BF1600

Controller Cards simplies the implementation of security applications.

These enhanced security capabilities reduce the threat of exposure and

minimize risk, while enabling real-time prevention, detection and responses

to potential threats.

BlueField also offers cost-effective and integrative solutions for Machine

Learning appliances, enabling efcient data delivery for real-time

analytics and data insights based on superior RDMA and GPUDirect

RDMA technologies. Support for PCIe Gen4.0 helps future-proof the next

generation of high performance GPU cards.

Software Support

BF1500/BF1600 Controller Cards are shipped with Mellanox BlueOS

and a UEFI-based bootloader pre-installed. BlueOS is a Linux reference

distribution targeted at BlueField-based embedded systems; Mellanox

OFED and NVMe-oF support are installed by default.

BlueOS itself is based on the Yocto Project Poky distribution. Through

the use of the OpenEmbedded Build System and provided metadata,

BlueOS can be easily modied by customers to meet their specic Linux

distribution requirements.

BlueOS is Linux-based and run all customer Linux applications seamlessly.

Storage customers may also choose to run the Linux distribution of their

choice instead of BlueOS.

BF1500/BF1600 Controller Card

– FH¾L or FHHL form factor

– BlueField DPU with 16 Armv8 A72 cores (64 bit)

– PCIe Gen3.0/4.0 x16 golden nger connector (root

complex)

– Two on-card x8 PCIe Gen3.0 I-PEX connectors

– Dual-port BlueField Virtual Protocol Interconnect

(VPI) interface

• Ethernet: 10/25/40/50/100GbE QSFP ports

• InniBand: FDR/EDR QSFP ports

– Single-slot/dual-slot width heatsink - passive

cooling

– NC-SI connector on card

– External PCIe power connector

– CPLD for SSD control signals expansion

– 16GB eMMC memory for BIOS and OS

– SPI ash for NIC rmware

DRAM DIMM Support

(depending upon model)

– 2 sockets for DRAM DIMMs

– 2x16GB DDR4 SODIMM

– 16GB on-board DDR

Features

Table 1 - Part Numbers and Feature Set Breakdown

OPN Card Model BlueField Series PCI Express Interface

(3)

Crypto Support Memory Support Form Factor

MBF1M616A-CSNAT BF1600 BlueField

Controller Card, Dual Port

100Gb/s QSFP28

E-Series 16 cores PCIe Gen3.0/4.0 x16 No crypto 2x 16GB DIMM FH¾L

MBF1M606A-CSNAT E-Series 16 cores PCIe Gen3.0/4.0 x16 No crypto No DIMM FH¾L

MBF1M626A-CSNAT E-Series 16 cores PCIe Gen3.0 x16 + auxiliary card

with PCIe Gen3.0 x16

No crypto No DIMM FH¾L +

adjacent slot

MBF1M636A-CSNAT E-Series 16 cores PCIe Gen3.0 x16 + auxiliary card

with PCIe Gen3.0 x16

No crypto 2x 16GB DIMM FH¾L +

adjacent slot

MBF1M646A-CSNAT E-Series 16 cores PCIe Gen4.0 x16 No crypto 2x 8GB DIMM FH¾L

MBF1M656A-CSNAT E-Series 16 cores PCIe Gen3.0 x16 + auxiliary card

with PCIe Gen3.0 x16

No crypto 2x 8GB DIMM FH¾L +

adjacent slot

MBF1L516B-CSNAT BF1500 BlueField Controller

Card, Dual Port 100Gb/s

QSFP28

G-Series 16 cores PCIe Gen3.0/4.0 x16 No crypto 16GB on-board

DDR

FHHL

Notes: 1. All BF1500/BF1600 Controller Cards are shipped with the tall bracket mounted and a short bracket as an accessory.

2. PCIe auxiliary cards include 2 x CABLINE-CA II PLUS 350mm cables.

3. Refer to BlueField Software and Firmware release notes for availability of PCIe Gen 4.0 capabilities.

53839PB

Rev 1.7

Support

For information about Mellanox support packages, please

contact your Mellanox Technologies sales representative or

visit our Support Index page.