InfiniBand start-up launches three products for clustered computing

System Fabric Works unveils a router, a storage appliance and a memory appliance

Developments of the week in storage

A start-up in Austin Texas last week rolled out three storage appliances designed to interconnect clusters and improve performance.

System Fabric Works unveiled a router, a storage appliance and a memory appliance, which are based on industry standard components and software that uses the Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology.

The SystemFabricRouter uses InfiniBand to interconnect clusters of servers. It is capable of connecting as many as four separate clusters. The router users Mellanox silicon and can achieve bandwidth of as much as 1Gbps per port with latency between ports of 5 microseconds.

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A start-up in Austin Texas last week rolled out three storage appliances designed to interconnect clusters and improve performance.

System Fabric Works unveiled a router, a storage appliance and a memory appliance, which are based on industry standard components and software that uses the Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology.

The SystemFabricRouter uses InfiniBand to interconnect clusters of servers. It is capable of connecting as many as four separate clusters. The router users Mellanox silicon and can achieve bandwidth of as much as 1Gbps per port with latency between ports of 5 microseconds.

The SystemFabricStor storage appliance can be attached either to the 10G Ethernet network or to the Fibre Channel storage-area network. It uses 16 or 24 Serial ATA or Serial Attached SCSI drives and is available in a 3U or 5U chassis. Further it supports InfiniBand SCSI Remote Protocol (SRP), iSER, NFS over RDMA, the Lustre file system and Oracle 11g RAC applications.

SystemFabricMem is the memory appliance. It provides as much as 8TB of DRAM in a single rack.

System Fabric Works was founded in 2002 by Bob Pearson, formerly of VEIO, an early InfiniBand vendor; and Carl CariCari, formerly of Burroughs and IBM.

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Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.