It’s one of those technologies that many have only had cursory awareness of. It is certainly not a ‘mainstream’ technology in comparison to IP, Ethernet or even Fibre Channel. Those who have awareness of it know Infiniband as a high performance compute clustering technology that is typically used for very short interconnects within the Data Center. While this is true, it’s uses and capacity have been expanded into many areas that were once thought to be out of its realm. In addition, many of the distance limitations that have prevented it’s expanded use are being extended. In some instances to rather amazing distances that rival the more Internet oriented networking technologies. This article will look closely at this networking technology from both historical and evolutionary perspectives. We will also look at some of the unique solutions that are offered by its use.
Not your mother’s Infiniband
The InfiniBand (IB) specification defines the methods & architecture of the interconnect that establishes the interconnection of the I/O subsystems of next generation of servers, otherwise known as compute clustering. The architecture is based on a serial, switched fabric that currently defines link bandwidths between 2.5 and 120 Gbits/sec. It effectively resolves the Continue reading