News and New Products

InfiniBand lives—and even thrives—in storage and clustering

By Maury Wright -- EDN, 3/17/2005

Perhaps Infiniband was slow to mature, and it appeared at times ready to die, but now the high-speed interconnect is finding wide usage in connecting clusters of servers and as a SAN (storage-area-networking) technology. Indeed, server and storage vendors, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun, and others now offer InfiniBand-enabled systems. Long-time InfiniBand proponent Mellanox has offered dual-port 10- and 20-Gbps chips at prices upward of $200 and now has driven down cost and power consumption in the new single-port InfinHost III Lx that goes for $69 (high volumes) and draws only 2W. The company will also offer a PCI Express InfiniBand adapter card.

“With Infiniband’s industry-leading scalability and performance, solutions such as 10-Gbps adapter cards coming from a number of companies, including Mellanox, will help drive down the cost per node of 10-Gbps enabled servers,” says Jim Pappas, director of initiative marketing for Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group. “This broad growth of products will have a positive effect on the proliferation of 10-Gbps clusters in performance business and technical computing applications.”

In fact, InfinBand is one of a handful of potential technologies whose time has come from a performance perspective and that is symbiotic with the capabilities of PCI Express and the demands of the market. PCI Express provides a scalable interconnect to the latest processors that starts at 2.5 Gbps and goes up in multiples as designers add “lanes,” or additional serial interfaces. To effectively connect such systems into clusters, designers need a low-latency interface that’s capable of 10- or 20-Gbps rates. Of course 10-GbE (Gigabit Ethernet) is also a player as an interconnect, but Mellanox officials believe that TCP/IP adds too much overhead for Ethernet to be affective as a storage or server interconnect. Ethernet fans claim that TCP/IP offload engines can overcome any limitation inherent in Ethernet. Later this year, EDN will take a detailed look at the server and storage interconnect space.

Mellanox Technologies, 1-408-970-3400, www.mellanox.com.