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Infiniband jumps to 40Gbit/s as Mellanox ships product

posted on 02 April 2008 09:55

The SSD of cluster networks

Mellanox is shipping a 40Gbit/s InfiniBand host channel adapter. It means that bi-directional cluster bandwidth of 6.46GB/sec is here now while data centre-class Ethernet is years away.

The PCIe ConnectX IB host channel adapter (HCA) will cost about $500 and is supported by a raft of cable suppliers and Intel who acan all connnect to it. Its latency is less than a microsecond.

No storage supplier is mentioned in the announcement, not surprising as it would be like connecting Niagara falls to a domestic water supply. Where InfiniBand will fit in the storage world is as a very high speed pipe linking a server cluster to a storage area network (SAN) fabric director or data centre switch, or to clustered node directors front-ending file storage.

The target environments are high-performance computing (HPC) and the I/O-bound end of enterprise computing. The rise of multi-core servers running multiple virtual machines has emphasised the need for very much increased server I/O bandwidth.

Ethernet does not look as if it can satisfy the high end part of this need. The developing Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE) standard is several years away and depends upon a new data centre standard for Ethernet which provides predictable packet delivery. This means that InfiniBand is the main choice for customers and vendors in the HPC and HPC-end of the enterprise markets.

It doesn't mean much against the huge number of Ethernet interfaces sold but IDC reckons that the HCA compound annual growth rate for HCAs is just over 50 percent from now to 2011, resulting in 781,104 InfiniBand ports being bought in 2011; relative peanuts but a good enough living for InfiniBand suppliers.