More InfiniBand products unveiled

InfiniBand activity sped up recently with the introduction of several announcements from InfiniCon, Voltaire, SBS Technologies and the InfiniBand Trade Association.

The announcements are:

* A Host Channel Adapter from SBS Technologies.

* A demonstration by Voltaire of iSCSI Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over InfiniBand.

* A developer’s kit from InfiniCon.

* A list of InfiniBand gear that works together from the InfiniBand Trade Association.

SBS Technologies recently announced a host channel adapter for bringing InfiniBand technology to servers. The IB4X-PCIX-2 InfiniBand HCA is a 4x InfiniBand adapter with two ports. It gives 10G bit/sec data transfer capability to applications that need it. It will be used with SBS’ eight-port 4x switch.

The IB4X-PCIX-2 has Linux drivers. Company representatives say Irix, VxWorks and Solaris drivers are coming soon. The adapter uses silicon from Mellanox that supports RDMA to reduce overhead. It also supports the SCSI Remote Protocol and IP over InfiniBand.

The adapter is shipping now for $1,700.

Start-up Voltaire recently demo’ed software to let users join iSCSI networks to clusters of InfiniBand-enabled servers. If a user installs iSCSI RDMA software on an InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter in a server, the server can connect to an InfiniBand cluster in the data center and transport Fibre Channel data using iSCSI over the Gigabit Ethernet connection. Using RDMA removes processing cycles from the host computer, thus allowing it to run applications more efficiently. In addition, an iSCSI-enabled InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter eliminates the need to have a separate Fiber Channel host bus adapter in the server to connect servers and storage to the InfiniBand cluster.

InfiniCon will be offering a developer’s kit for its InfiniBand HCAs and switches. It will sell for $8,500.

Also, the InfiniBand Trade Association will be introducing an “integrator’s list” of companies that comply with the InfiniBand 1.1 specification. This will help users considering InfiniBand know which gear is up to snuff.