InfiniBand systems advance

Growing impetus behind Infiniband as an alternative to Fibre Channel and Ethernet in server farms and data centres.

Two recent announcements should build InfiniBand’s credentials for use in high-performance storage networks.

QLogic’s intended $60m purchase of InfiniBand specialist SilverStorm sets the technology on a course to compete with Fibre Channel (FC) and Ethernet, while Isilon last week added new clustering software to its InfiniBand storage systems.

The SilverStorm buyout, combined with QLogic’s $109m acquisition of InfiniBand chip maker Pathscale earlier this year, will add considerable impetus to a technology that has so far largely failed to attract enterprise storage managers.

“The acquisition of SilverStorm builds on our portfolio of InfiniBand connectivity technology, which will provide our customers with a leading-edge, end-to-end solution,” said QLogic chief executive H K Desai.

Isilon’s OneFS 4.5 operating system, launched last week, can store a petabyte of data in a single file system, at speeds of up to 10GB/s over InfiniBand interconnects. The firm also launched SnapshotIQ, a data protection application, and SmartConnect, a load-balancing client utility designed to improve storage failover.

“The high-performance computing space is growing. That’s where the future is and that’s why we need InfiniBand in the communications link to offer 10kbit/s per node and extremely low latency to ensure accurate [data] synchronisation each time,” said Isilon’s Sam Grocott.