InfiniBand finds its calling

InfiniBand, wherefore art thou?

Developments of the week in storage

InfiniBand, it appears, has finally found its place as the de-facto interconnect for high-performance computing environments - that is if you believe the noise vendors are making about the interconnect that now has been around for about 9 years. Maybe it takes time for an interconnect to take off - or perhaps it is because other interconnects like Myricom's Myrinet or Quadric's QSNet have not - but now seems to be the time for InfiniBand, which performs at 40Gbps and is supported by vendors such as Mellanox, Sun, QLogic and Dell.

InfiniBand has grown from a technology that once had numerous supporters – Intel, Banderacom, Vieo, Infinicon, PathScale – to one that has several major manufacturers – Mellanox and QLogic among them.

Obsidian Strategics and ADVA Optical Networking are pushing InfiniBand over distance – the companies have partnered to bring InfiniBand over 100Gbps. Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing links with Obsidian’s Longbow C Series and ADVA’s optical transport.

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InfiniBand, it appears, has finally found its place as the de-facto interconnect for high-performance computing environments - that is if you believe the noise vendors are making about the interconnect that now has been around for about 9 years. Maybe it takes time for an interconnect to take off - or perhaps it is because other interconnects like Myricom's Myrinet or Quadric's QSNet have not - but now seems to be the time for InfiniBand, which performs at 40Gbps and is supported by vendors such as Mellanox, Sun, QLogic and Dell.

InfiniBand has grown from a technology that once had numerous supporters – Intel, Banderacom, Vieo, Infinicon, PathScale – to one that has several major manufacturers – Mellanox and QLogic among them.

Obsidian Strategics and ADVA Optical Networking are pushing InfiniBand over distance – the companies have partnered to bring InfiniBand over 100Gbps. Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing links with Obsidian’s Longbow C Series and ADVA’s optical transport.

Endace Limited of Auckland, New Zealand also announced a monitoring package for InfiniBand Dual Data Rate (DDR) fabrics that analyzes the performance of low latency InfiniBand networks.

And finally, Voltaire announced that is WinOF software version 2.0 is available. With WinOF 2.0, any Windows server application can use InfiniBand to take advantage of high performance. WinOF includes software for database clustering, high performance computing, communications and storage applications and is based on the open source WinOF software suite from the OpenFabrics Alliance.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.

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