Mellanox sets InfiniBand example
 
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Fabless semiconductor company Mellanox is introducing a set of InfiniBand server blades as a reference platform that other companies can use to easily and quickly manufacture their own compact InfiniBand server or switch blades.
The company will introduce the Nitro II blade platform. It consists of 12 InfiniBand blades, two switches and a backplane, which are designed to cluster servers in data centers. The company demonstrated its 1x Nitro I blade platform at the Intel Developer's Forum earlier this year.
Companies can use Mellanox's reference platform to develop Layer 3 through 7 Ethernet-to-InfiniBand routers, Fibre Channel target devices for storage and native InfiniBand storage blades.
" [Mellanox's blade implementation] is important because it's a high-quality reference implementation of an InfiniBand-enabled server and also demonstrates very new InfiniBand component technology - host channel adapters/switches, " says Richard Fichera, research fellow at Giga. " My impression is of very good hardware engineering. "
In the Nitro II implementation, 12 server blades and two Gigabit switches fit in a 5U (8.75-inch-high) rack-mounted chassis. In the configuration, four channels each have 2.5 G-bit/sec of bandwidth. Each server blade uses Mellanox's InfiniHost host channel adapter and an Intel Xeon 2.2-GHz processor with 512K bytes of cache memory. The blades are diskless and capable of connecting to external storage-area networks or network-attached storage.
Each switch connects to all 12 blades, giving a redundant path to all blades in the chassis. The Nitro II switch has 16 ports: 12 link to the backplane, four to external connections. An optional management slot is available.
The chassis, which includes the backplane, power supplies and fans, is capable of providing 480G bit/sec of total system bandwidth.
InfiniBand ports within servers alone are expected to grow from just 14,700 ports in 2002 to 7.7 million in 2005, according to IDC.
RELATED LINKS
InfiniBand switch set to debut, 03/18/02
Intel rethinks its InfiniBand strategy, 06/03/02
VMware pumps up server partitioning software
Network World, 07/22/02
Deni Connor is a senior editor at Network World covering storage, SANs, Novell and Novell-related products. You can reach her at dconnor@nww.com.
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