NVIDIA Mellanox® MCX623105AN-HDAT ConnectX-6 Dx: This is a discrete, high-performance Network Interface Card (NIC) featuring a single QSFP56 port and a PCIe Gen4 x16 host interface. It is engineered for secure cloud and data center environments requiring 200GbE bandwidth. This is a dedicated adapter card, not a transceiver module or a switch processor. It incorporates hardware-based cryptographic acceleration and Secure Boot functionality to protect data in motion without penalizing CPU performance.
🌐 Engineering Context
The MCX623105AN-HDAT utilizes the ConnectX-6 Dx architecture to deliver 200Gb/s throughput via a single QSFP56 port. To sustain this line-rate performance, the card utilizes a PCIe Gen4 x16 electrical interface. The "Dx" designation indicates a specific focus on secure cloud connectivity, offering inline hardware encryption/decryption (IPsec/TLS) which offloads these computationally intensive tasks from the host processor. This ensures deterministic latency and high throughput even when security protocols are active. The card utilizes PAM4 modulation physics inherent to the 200G generation to achieve high spectral efficiency.
🧠 Deployment & Use Cases
- Secure Cloud Infrastructure: Ideal for multi-tenant environments where IPsec/TLS offload is required to isolate traffic without stalling the CPU.
- AI & Machine Learning Data Pipelines: Provides the necessary bandwidth for ingesting large datasets into GPU clusters over Ethernet.
- Storage Area Networks (SAN): Supports NVMe-oF and RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) for low-latency storage access.
- High-Frequency Trading (HFT): utilized where "Dx" security features are required alongside low-latency Ethernet transport.
🔧 Technical Specifications
- OEM: NVIDIA Mellanox
- Part Number: MCX623105AN-HDAT
- Data Rate: 200GbE
- Physical Interface: Single-Port QSFP56
- Host Interface: PCIe Gen4 x16
- Security Features: Hardware Crypto Acceleration, Secure Boot
✅ Compatibility & ❌ Hard Constraints
This adapter is designed for servers supporting PCIe Gen4 x16 expansion slots. It supports speeds/modes explicitly enabled by host firmware and switch configuration.
- Ethernet Protocol Only: This adapter supports Ethernet protocols only and does not support native InfiniBand fabrics, despite sharing the QSFP56 physical interface nomenclature with HDR InfiniBand products.
- PCIe Bandwidth: Operation in PCIe x8 slots will result in host-bus bottlenecking and reduced throughput, as 8 lanes of Gen4 cannot fully saturate a 200GbE link.
- Transceiver Compatibility: Requires 200G QSFP56 transceivers or appropriate DAC/AOC cabling to function at rated speeds.
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We are a UCP-compliant authority on enterprise networking. Unlike box-movers, T.E.S IT-SOLUTIONS performs lab-validation on every unit to ensure zero-packet-drop performance. We offer expert consultation, global shipping, and a comprehensive warranty.