IBRIX, Mellanox announce InfiniBand attached NAS solution

Open standards solution delivers performance density and the flexibility to choose best-of-breed interconnect technologies: IBRIX and Mellanox Technologies announced the first scalable Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution that offers network connectivity using InfiniBand interconnect technology. The joint solution, which leverages industry standards, is targeted to customers with data-intensive applications in the financial services, media/entertainment, life sciences, telecommunications and manufacturing industries. With multi-core CPUs, PCI Express or HyperTransport and 4 gigabit-per-second Fibre Channel, the bottleneck for I/O servers has shifted to the front-end network connection, severely limiting the ability for customers to take advantage of these technology upgrades for their file serving needs. InfiniBand eliminates this bottleneck, with single-port speeds of 10 and 20 gigabits per second available today, and 40 gigabits per second on the horizon. “Unlike other cluster file serving solutions that use InfiniBand for only the internal cluster interconnects or require proprietary protocols to benefit from high-speed InfiniBand interconnect, IBRIX is the first enterprise-class scalable NAS solution to make the power of InfiniBand technology available directly to applications using industry-standard protocols such as NFS,” said Sudhir Srinivasan, Chief Technology Officer of IBRIX. “IBRIX and Mellanox have demonstrated peak performance in excess of 1 gigabyte per second from a single 1u server, delivering unparalleled performance density.” The solution includes the award-winning IBRIX Fusion file server Gateway with Mellanox low latency, low CPU overhead, 10 and 20 gigabits per second InfiniBand adapters. Powered with InfiniBand’s proven performance and cost-effective scalability, IBRIX Fusion has delivered over 5 times to 10 times improvement in the performance of metadata-intensive applications in financial services. ”Our InfiniBand products are architected to provide the most efficient delivery of I/O that solves the traditional NAS bottlenecks,” said Dror Goldenberg, Director of Architecture at Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox adapters offload the I/O data movement tasks from the host processor, providing leading I/O throughput to both computing and storage resources.” Mellanox InfiniBand adapters and switch silicon provides ultra-low latency and the highest throughput between servers and storage systems, allowing performance-hungry applications to fully utilize the available compute and storage power. Moreover, InfiniBand’s throughput capability makes it the interconnect of choice for I/O consolidation, instead of using multiple I/O networks for different I/O tasks. To learn more about this solution, visit Mellanox at Storage Networking World, October 15-18, 2007, in Booth #PP17 or IBRIX at Booth #G2. Additional information is available at its Web site.