News

posted on 27 June 2008 06:09

The day after Brocade asserted that converged Ethernet is its server-to-server networking play, Mellanox has announced InfiniBand connectivity for IBM's iDataPlex.

Voltaire has also announced support for iDataPlex.

The IBM iDataPlex is a new category of server that dramatically increases compute density while significantly decreasing energy consumption and associated data center costs for Internet-scale computing.

Jim Gargan, IBM Systems and Technology Group VP, said: “IBM iDataPlex combined with Mellanox ConnectX adapters provide high-performance InfiniBand connectivity and scalability for high-performance computing data centers.”

Mellanox says the use of multi-core CPUs, virtualized infrastructures and networked storage are driving the need for 20Gbit/s InfiniBand. With its ConnectX HCA, I/O consolidation of clustering, communication, storage and management traffic onto a single 20Gbit/s InfiniBand fabric reduces both upfront capital costs and long term TCO (total cost of ownership) with less fabric equipment to maintain.

Thad Omura, Mellanox' product marketing VP, said: “The exponential growth of enterprise data centers and extreme computing continues as streaming video, online gaming and social networks spike Internet traffic, requiring companies to build vaster pools of computers. The IBM iDataPlex rack system with Mellanox ConnectX connectivity enables extreme computing, real-time response, I/O consolidation and power savings for high-performance computing and the emerging cloud computing sectors.”

It is ironic that both Ethernet and InfiniBand are being pitched as network link simplification plays when it is quite likely that data centers could end up with InfiniBand-linked server clusters and FCOE and FC-links to Fibre Channel storage. If CIOs are not careful their data centers could end up with more network links rather than less.

We can expect the InfiniBand companies to make energetic marketing pitches as InfiniBand is here now at 20Gbit/s with a 40Gbit/s version coming whereas, apart from Blade Network Technologies, the Ethernet server-server link promoters say 10GbE is the platform but we ned to wait for Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) which will provide the deterministic and low-latency link needed. It isn't here yet so CIOs with HPC-like needs in their data centers will have to use InfiniBand.

Scale-out server vendors will generally welcome InfiniBand as a way of easing HPC-style computing adoption in enterprise data centers. So, the net net is, if HPC computing is coming into your enterprise data center, then network platform consolidation could turn out to be a myth.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}