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Mellanox certainly know how to throw a party.
We joined them at the Sky Garden, a private venue atop one of London's most iconic skyscrapers. With a hint of "Bond villain's lair" about it, this luxurious location made a perfect backdrop to announce some special networking products.
![The Sky Garden](./images/skygarden-plants.jpg)
During the launch, StackHPC's CEO John Taylor discussed the scale of the data challenges of the Square Kilometre Array with Mellanox CEO Eyal Waldman.
![John Taylor and Eyal Waldman](./images/skygarden-john.jpg)
Spectrum-2 supports ground-breaking Ethernet link speeds: 200Gbits/s and 400Gbits/s were announed. 400Gbits/s is pushing the envelope to the point where it doesn't even have a physical cabling standard ratified yet.
Customers with the most demanding network-intensive workloads may hope to soon have access to the Mellanx ConnectX-6 200Gbits/s NIC. The next generation NIC also promises enhanced support for Open vSwitch offloads. There isn't a NIC announced for 400Gbits/s yet...
The Future of SDN
Aside from raw speed, there were also some really interesting features for SDN. The Spectrum-2 ASIC includes support for the emerging P4 language, embodying the next generation of SDN, and we will be watching for details of that as they become public.
Open Ethernet supported
![Open Ethernet](./images/skygarden-oe.jpg)
Mellanox CEO Eyal Waldman also affirmed Spectrum-2 support for Open Ethernet, enabling customers to choose an alternative network OS (Mellanox OS and Cumulus Linux) - although neither choice would be considered open source.