InfiniSwitch steps out

InfiniSwitch last week announced its line of InfiniBand products is now available.

These include products from Lane15, which merged with InfiniSwitch earlier last month, and products previously made by InfiniSwitch. The product line is called the InfiniSwitch Switched Fabric Network System (SFNS) and comprises a 12- to 24-port switch, a dual-port host channel adapter and management software.

InfiniSwitch’s products are aimed at data-center server clusters and high-performance computing. They will connect not only to servers, but also to storage devices and networks. In particular, the products can connect to network-attached storage appliances and storage-area networks and can be used to support most databases and network/systems management tools.

The InfiniSwitch 12/24 Port Leaf Switch has a 1U rack-mountable chassis. It runs at 10G bit/sec per port and has redundant switch cards, operating systems, power supplies and cooling systems for fault-tolerance. In addition, the power supplies and cooling systems are hot-swappable, allowing the switch to remain operating during repair. The switch has built-in management capability, supporting SNMP, Telnet, a command-line interface and Ethernet access. The switch starts at $10,000.

The Lane15 FabricManager is used to configure the switch. The software initializes the fabric, discovers devices, and brings the fabric up and down. The FabricManager lets an administrator manage an InfiniBand subnet, monitor performance and manage routes. It consists of a graphical interface. FabricManager is $75 per switch port.

The Dual Port InfiniBand Host Channel Adaptor fits in a server and connects it to the InfiniBand switch. It has as much as 256M bytes of memory, full 10G-bit/sec support and comes in a small-form-factor PCI/PCI-X interface. It has drivers for SuSE and Red Hat Linux as well as Windows 2000. The InfiniBand Host Channel Adaptor is $750.