HPCwire: InfiniBand and the Enterprise Datacenter

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September 09, 2008

InfiniBand and the Enterprise Datacenter

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InfiniBand was once billed as the foundational, system-wide interconnect to unify all of enterprise networking. While that didn't happen, the protocol is playing an increasingly important role in the datacenter. With the steady adoption of more powerful business-continuity, disaster recovery and grid computing applications, many enterprises are turning to InfiniBand as the enabler of their most latency-intolerant, bandwidth-intensive applications across Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical networks.

Dr. Casimer DeCusatis, distinguished engineer of the IBM System and Technology Group, and Todd Bundy, director with ADVA Optical Networking, are longtime shapers and observers of enterprise datacenter networking. In this conversation, they offer their thoughts on InfiniBand's place in the enterprise datacenter moving forward. Can InfiniBand co-exist with emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)? What strategic factors must enterprise datacenter managers weigh in ensuring that today's and tomorrow's needs are cost-effectively met?

HPCwire: What are the most important business drivers and trends that enterprise datacenter managers are negotiating today?

Dr. Casimer DeCusatis: First, the pace of innovation is accelerating. When you consider that it took close to a century for absolutely world-changing technologies like the automobile and telephone to reach 50-percent market adoption, it's just astounding to see what has happened and what is happening with the Internet, mobile, wireless, storage, etc. These advancements in technology are enabling business transformation -- look, as an example, at how advancements in storage technologies have fueled revolutionary capabilities in medical and financial networking. And the business innovations push back to drive continued technology advancement. It's a cycle.

So, that accelerating pace of innovation obviously has tremendous impact on the enterprise datacenter. In addition, there's the ongoing emphasis on network convergence, for the sake of simplicity and cost efficiency. Plus, there are interesting new datacenter architectures coming out that demand evaluation.

Those are the converging forces at a broad level, and they have come together to drive the most prevalent contemporary vision for the new enterprise datacenter -- an evolutionary model that provides for efficient IT service delivery today and seamlessly accommodates change for tomorrow.

HPCwire: What are the technology underpinnings of that vision?

Todd Bundy: There are some basic requirements that enterprise datacenters share, though in varying degrees of importance depending on the business objectives that a particular datacenter is striving to meet. These requirements include unified fabric infrastructure, high bandwidth, low latency, unified cloud management, connectivity over extended distances, security, resiliency, energy efficiency, open standards for multi-vendor interoperability, etc. We can see that the world wants to eventually get to an end state of global networking with zero downtime. But in the evolution from here to there, there will be a lot of different needs among enterprises -- and even a lot of different needs among applications and services run by a given enterprise.

HPCwire: Where does InfiniBand fit into this story?

Bundy: InfiniBand developed out of precisely this type of conversation, and it was envisioned as the powerful, unifying interconnect fabric for business networking.

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