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April 24, 2006
Mellanox Demos 20 Gbps InfiniBand
At the Server Blade Summit last week, Mellanox Technologies Ltd demonstrated InfiniBand-connected blade servers dynamically provisioned into scalable, service-centric pools of computing resources and virtualized for corporate desktop deployments. Flexible I/O modules facilitate independent scaling of InfiniBand connected processing blades and the number of I/O connections that are used to seamlessly integrate into existing data center infrastructure. InfiniBand-based blade servers provide data centers with optimal total cost of ownership and features:
- Virtualized I/O modules that provide agility, flexibility and consolidation benefits.
- Power-efficient switch and single-chip, 20Gb/s adapter silicon that facilitate dense, space-saving systems.
- Intelligent InfiniBand I/O architecture that drive the deployment of cost-effective virtualized desktops.
"With
over 10 leading vendors shipping production InfiniBand-based blade
servers and several more on the way, low-latency, 10 Gbps InfiniBand is
the de-facto high-performance dense computing fabric of choice. 20Gb/s
InfiniBand provides even higher levels of computing efficiency and
performance," said Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing at
Mellanox Technologies. "A new generation of virtualized blade servers
that meets the needs of the agile data center, such as the innovative
PANTAmatrix system from PANTA Systems, is paving the way for
unprecedented levels of dynamism in data center application and
resource deployments."
InfiniBand's high-bandwidth and low-latency characteristics are used to
interconnect compute blades to virtualized I/O modules. As a result,
compute resources can scale independently from I/O resources used for
networking, storage and graphics and can be dynamically reconfigured to
meet changing data center requirements.
"InfiniBand
building blocks from Mellanox enable compute resources to be
dynamically matched with each I/O component, facilitating unprecedented
server performance and scalability," said Scott Rose, vice president of product management at PANTA Systems. "The PANTAmatrix system has been
able to demonstrate greater than 10X performance improvements for
actual compute and I/O intensive customer workloads such as streams
processing. In addition, server reconfiguration is possible within
minutes, in order to match workload demands, using the System
Management interface."
Utilizing the small form factor and power-efficient characteristics of
Mellanox's InfiniBand solutions, OEMs have designed dense and
power-efficient blade architectures not possible with any other
interconnect technology. For example, the PANTAmatrix system packs 128
dual-core AMD Opteron processors per rack, with up to 40 percent power savings
versus traditional rack architectures, and scales to over 9,000
processors per cluster.
The increasing deployment of virtualized host client infrastructure that delivers full desktop functionality to thin clients, utilize virtualized servers in the data center for dynamically deployable computing and I/O resources. This ensures optimal resource utilization for desktop applications and allows quicker deployment of new users. InfiniBand's channel I/O architecture provides virtual machines servicing these virtualized desktops the ability to logically appear as multiple intelligent end-points. Each end-point can provide dedicated services such as QoS (Quality-of-Service), isolation and security for each consumer.
The usage of hypervisor offload capabilities available in InfiniBand adapters frees processing resources to host more virtual machines per CPU, and as a result, more desktops per server. PANTA Systems has advanced the adoption and qualification of 64-bit InfiniBand support for popular virtualization solutions, such as the open-source Xen hypervisor. By providing this capability, the PANTAmatrix facilitates x86-64 virtualization adoption, even at the core of the data center, enabling corporations to minimize hardware capital expenditure, streamline and simplify IT support, and most importantly, enhance security of critical corporate data assets.
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