Mellanox turned its InfiniBand eye towards storage last week when it introduced a platform to link disk drives with a server processor’s bus.

Mellanox claims the technology will reduce Oracle database back-up and restoration costs and recover costs from using mid-range Fibre Channel storage by as much as 50%. While interconnecting servers and storage was the original intent of InfiniBand, most users are using it as a server clustering interconnect instead. This is the first time a vendor has used InfiniBand to cluster storage.

The company tested Oracle Database 10g with its new reference storage platform, the MTD1000, which uses InfiniBand to connect inexpensive Serial ATA drives. The MTD1000 includes 14 ATA drives at 250G bytes each. It is intended as a storage platform that OEMs can bring to market. The MDT1000 also has dual Intel Xeon processors and is outfitted with PCI Express.

Using the MTD1000, Mellanox conducted a series of backup and recovery tests using Oracle Recovery Manager and Automatic Storage Management. The tests outperformed, according to Mellanox’ claims, a mid-range Fibre Channel storage-area network and networks configured with low-end Fibre Channel I/O and Serial ATA drives.

The company used Iometer to benchmark the MDT1000. Mellanox claims results of 780M bit/sec to the disk - a speed that is four times as fast as 2G bit/sec Fibre Channel. The leap in storage performance can be attributed not only to InfiniBand’s 10G bit/sec throughput, but also to its remote direct memory addressing and hardware transport capabilities.

The MTD1000 storage platform is based on a Supermicro server and Western Digital Raptor Serial ATA drives. It is a 3U high Intel Xeon processor-based server with redundant power supplies and fans, a dual-port InfiniBand PCI Express host channel adapter and up to 3.75T bytes of storage.

The platform is available to OEMs and resellers for $12,000 and is available now.

CORRECTION: A recent newsletter misstated the top capacity of the IBM DS8000, which scales to 192T bytes. Also, only the DS8000 supports IBM’s Virtualization Engine.