ENKI - Managed Cloud Computing - InfiniBand and You

InfiniBand and You

Written by: Louis Corso

As the demand for faster interconnect continues to push on the limitations of Ethernet and Fibre Channel technology, InfiniBand's time to shine is coming soon. InfiniBand provides some unique advantages of legacy technologies. Though InfiniBand is not on the radar of many data center managers and IT directors today, it stands to gain ground as IB switch manufacturers announce throughput numbers this year which are beyond anything seen previously.

InfiniBand has been on the radar here at ENKI for a few years now. Our CEO Dave Durkee saw early on that the real bottleneck in a virtualized environment was the connection between the storage and compute layers as well as collaborating virtual machines in virtual private datacenters. He knew that the 10 Gb/s promised by coming technologies in Ethernet and Fibre Channel, while adequate for physical environments, would not cut it once a hypervisor was layered on top of the hardware since each virtual machine could nearly saturate such a pipe. For a true high performance, enterprise-grade cloud experience, Dave saw InfiniBand as the clear winner for several reasons. With a number of recent blog posts and press releases touting the benefits of IB, we have seen a growing number of prospects lining up at our door due to Dave’s foresight. If you don’t know about InfiniBand, now is the time to learn, and ENKI is here to help.

While researching for this post, the first place I went was to the website of the InfiniBand Trade Association. I encourage you to do the same, but I’ve reprinted some of the highlights taken directly from their site here as well:

- InfiniBand is the only publicly available solution to support 40Gb/s host connectivity and 120Gb/s switch to switch links.

- InfiniBand offers ultra-low latency, with delays measured as low as 1µs (.000001 seconds)

- An InfiniBand link can carry networking, clustering, and storage data over one connection for simplified management

- InfiniBand allows for fully redundancy with automatic failover to meet the demands of mission-critical applications

- InfiniBand has a detailed roadmap in place for increasing connection speeds over the next 2 years. Within the next 3 years, bandwidth approaching 1000 Gb/s is expected

Even with the increased performance it provides over legacy technologies, InfiniBand is still little utilized outside of the HPC community, where it is the chosen method of interconnect in five out of the top ten clusters, as of their November 2009 report. IB remains mostly an unknown throughout much of the enterprise IT industry. According to a recent survey by IB switch manufacturer Voltaire, 54% of IT industry respondents intend to rely solely on Ethernet for their future data center expansions. All this may be about to change, however, with the release of a new report by Voltaire claiming that their Grid Director 4036E switch, featuring 34 40 gb/s IB ports, delivers a full 2.72 tb/s! With transfer rates busting through the ceiling, I believe that the data center community will have a hard time continuing to push InfiniBand into the margins.

Going forward, I predict that we will see more manufacturers announcing I/O results that were previously unimaginable thanks to InfiniBand. ENKI intends to ride this wave as well, and I expect that you will see some interesting test results in the near future supporting Dave’s decision to implement IB in our data centers. New hardware such as the 4036E, which is currently powering data through ENKI’s PrimaCloud IaaS platform, blows current and future upcoming generations of Ethernet technology out of the water, something that will be hard to ignore as developers continue to challenge the data center to do more and more.

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