HPCwire: Mellanox Intros 10Gb/s InfiniBand Adapter

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March 07, 2006

Mellanox Intros 10Gb/s InfiniBand Adapter

Mellanox Technologies Ltd, a provider of business and technical computing interconnects, has announced the availability of a 10Gb/s InfiniBand adapter card. The MHES14 is a single-port, high-bandwidth, low-latency, 4X InfiniBand host channel adapter (HCA) card that provides data centers with a solution to consolidate communications, computing, management and storage traffic onto a single fabric.

A single InfiniBand HCA card in each server and storage node is the only I/O adapter required to interconnect a grid, as opposed to several multi-port Enterprise Gigabit Ethernet NICs and Fibre Channel HBAs. InfiniBand I/O consolidation simplifies cabling, eases system management, eliminates fabric infrastructure equipment and reduces power.

Virtual infrastructure solutions, like those from VMware, when deployed over InfiniBand will facilitate off-the-shelf data center applications such as CRM, ERP, order processing, financial, payroll, inventory management, and others to run transparently while realizing the inherent benefits of I/O consolidation and performance increase of a high bandwidth, low-latency interconnect. As part of the VMware Community Source program, Mellanox is taking a leadership position in cooperative development of high performance virtual infrastructure solutions based on VMware ESX Server.

"InfiniBand's ability to partition I/O to multiple end-points, and consolidate I/O across data center applications holds the promise for added flexibility and cost savings within VMware environments," said Bernie Mills, senior director of developer programs at VMware. "Mellanox has a clear commitment to delivering cost-effective virtual infrastructure solutions and has been actively involved in the VMware Community Source program since its inception. We continue to look forward to working with them in concert with other InfiniBand vendors within the community."

Multi-tiered server architectures have been deployed in data centers to provide dedicated computing resources for fixed functions. As the demands on data centers increasingly fluctuate, this multi-tiered model has proven inefficient given the fact that IT managers spend more than 70 percent of their time on maintenance and resource allocation. Modern data centers are now opting for grid computing architectures, where applications such as web servers, middleware servers, and storage servers and systems can be dynamically deployed from a common shared pool of server and storage resources. Fabric solutions that support the most demanding applications are a requirement to share resources, ease manageability and lowering total cost of ownership.

"InfiniBand is architected to efficiently support multiple traffic channels on a single interface making it the ideal grid computing fabric that interconnects both server and native InfiniBand storage nodes," said Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "By offering the MHES14 InfiniBand HCA at Enterprise Gigabit Ethernet NIC prices and below Fibre Channel HBAs, Mellanox is removing the price barrier to data center I/O consolidation and easing rapid expansion of clustered computing and storage resources."

With Linux distributions supporting InfiniBand based on open source development from OpenIB.org, in addition to market-wide operating system support for Windows, AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS X, Solaris, and VxWorks, the required application interfaces that enable InfiniBand I/O consolidation are available today.

In addition, the recent production availability of native InfiniBand storage systems from several leading vendors provide key building blocks to deploy a virtualized data center over a unified InfiniBand fabric.

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