Mellanox last week introduced a low-power, low-cost InfiniBand host bus adapter and chipset for blades and other servers.
The InfiniHost III Lx chipset is intended for blade server manufacturers and vendors using Landed on Motherboard technology. It provides them with 10G bit/sec capability for $69 in volume. The company also introduced a single-port host channel adapter that uses the chipset.
Mellanox says 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters are much more expensive than the InfiniHost III Lx. The company says a 10 Gig adapter, which dissipates 15 to 20 watts of power, can cost as much as $800. The InfiniHost III Lx consumes 2 watts of power.
The InfiniHost III Lx device is enabled with the latest PCI Express technology.
Because of the device's small size - about the size of a dime - it is well suited for use in blade servers and space-confined designs. It features full Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology and allows the host CPU to focus on processing applications rather than on I/O-related network tasks.
It also uses the MemFree technology, which eliminates the need for local memory. It uses systems memory for connection information and is backwards-compatible with previous Mellanox InfiniBand adapters.
The host channel adapter based on the InfiniHost III Lx chipset is the size of a credit card and plugs into any x4 slot. The integrated serializer/deserializer allows it to connect servers together over a 40-meter span using copper InfiniBand cables. The adapter can also use off-the-shelf fiber optics for connecting servers up to 300 meters apart.
Mellanox silicon is employed in InfiniBand host channel adapters and switches from TopSpin and InfiniCon Systems.
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