InfiniBand offers a viable interconnect alternative to Ethernet and Fibre Channel in LAN and SAN environments by delivering increased performance at reduced costs.
Originally envisioned as a multi-purpose, high-speed interconnect technology, InfiniBand became associated primarily with high performance computing and host-to-host messaging. Today, more companies in more industries are realizing the benefits that InfiniBand delivers. .
“Companies are beginning to discover that InfiniBand can be used for local and storage area networks in addition to message passing,” says Kent Koeninger, Technical Marketing Manager for Emerging HPC Technologies and Products at HP. With 20Gb per second performance, InfiniBand is an extremely fast interconnect technology. In addition to sheer speed, developers and IT professionals are also attracted to its low cost and industry support as an open standard.
Interconnect options
According to Koeninger, Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand are essentially the main interconnect technologies being used in the industry. Whereas Ethernet has a dominant foothold in local area network (LAN) environments and Fibre Channel is widely used in storage area networks (SAN), InfiniBand is moving to the forefront of interconnect options for infrastructure architects.
“Ethernet and Fibre Channel will continue to grow their market; they’re certainly not going away,” Koeninger suggests. “Meanwhile, InfiniBand is quietly proving to be a viable alternative to Ethernet and Fibre Channel in the LAN and SAN spaces by increasing performance while reducing costs.”
The financial services industry has paved much of this path, he explains. Similar to HPC organizations, banking, capital market and insurance firms place a premium on breakneck computational speed, making InfiniBand a logical interconnect option. Unlike HPC entities that primarily perform intermittent simulations, however, financial firms are dependent on continuous market analyses and therefore require surefire reliability.
The financial services industry’s successful adoption of InfiniBand has made it safe for non-scientific and non-engineering organizations to evaluate its merits for their own purposes. “Ever since the financial services industry demonstrated the reliability of InfiniBand in an enterprise setting, companies have been looking at it more closely. And why shouldn’t they? It’s faster than 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel, doesn’t produce as much latency and comes at a lower cost,” says Koeninger.
InfiniBand’s future
The future is bright for this rejuvenated interconnect technology. InfiniBand speed is expected to double by 2009, pushing it to 40Gb per second performance. And companies can implement infrastructure now in preparation for such performance gains. “InfiniBand is clearly a powerful messaging technology, and companies using it for host-to-host communications can easily implement gateways to their LANs and SANs,” says Koeninger. “It’s a fairly new approach to linking local and storage networks with server environments, but the speed is exceptional, the technology is time tested and the price is right. What’s not to like?”
HP offers complete InfiniBand solutions, including switches, host channel adapters (HCAs), cables and management software. All of HP’s rackmount and blade server products support InfiniBand. The HP BladeSystem c-Class includes an integrated InfiniBand DDR switch; representing the only DDR-rated blade enclosure available today. HP has also integrated InfiniBand into the HP Unified Cluster Portfolio (UCP) of pre-engineered and pre-packaged industry standard cluster solutions. InfiniBand is the most popular interconnect in UCP, Koeninger notes, when messaging faster than 1GbE is required.
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