GOVERNMENT

New blade enclosure provides the performance of 20Gb/s InfiniBand for small IT sites, remote locations and branch offices: Mellanox Technologies yesterday announced that the company’s 20Gb/s ConnectX IB InfiniBand mezzanine adapter cards and switch blades provide the optimal low-latency, high-performance interconnect for the new HP BladeSystem c3000 enclosure targeting midsize companies looking to realize the cost benefits of a bladed environment and the performance advantages of InfiniBand. According to IDC's most recent Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker released in August 2007, blade servers continue to be the fastest growing segment of the server market with 1.3 million units expected to ship in 2007 growing to 3.2 million units in 2010 -- a unit CAGR of 35%. HP is noted as the leading blade server vendor with 47 percent unit market share, primarily based on shipments of its BladeSystem c-Class infrastructure. Mellanox’s 20Gb/s InfiniBand interconnect products continue to be available for the HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosure in addition to the new c3000 enclosure. “The availability of 20Gb/s ConnectX IB InfiniBand interconnect in the BladeSystem c3000 provides midsize businesses as well as enterprise customers with remote locations and branch offices with leading multi-core server application performance and allows smaller scale clusters to benefit from the lowest latency interconnect,” said Eyal Waldman, CEO, president and chairman of the board of Mellanox Technologies. “The BladeSystem c3000 will help accelerate the proliferation of our InfiniBand products into additional high-growth vertical markets as more mainstream applications take advantage of InfiniBand’s real-time response, I/O consolidation and power savings as compared to using multiple I/O technologies.” “When it comes to the infrastructure behind their business, our customers deserve affordable technology that is right-sized for them – solutions that are not only powerful, but practical,” said Mark Potter, vice president, BladeSystem Division, HP. “The Mellanox ConnectX IB InfiniBand products further build on the leadership I/O capabilities of the HP BladeSystem c7000, providing superior connectivity that enables increased productivity at a price/performance unseen before by mid-market customers and businesses with small IT sites and remote offices.” The HP BladeSystem c3000, accelerated with Mellanox ConnectX IB InfiniBand adapters, benefits midsize business offices or branch locations that require as little as four to eight server or storage components to run enterprise-level business applications such as CRM, database, financial, manufacturing, order management, virtualization, and web services in a form better suited for them. In blade environments, I/O consolidation of clustering, communication, storage and management traffic onto a single 20Gb/s InfiniBand fabric reduces both upfront capital costs and long term TCO with less fabric equipment to maintain. In addition, the use of multi-core CPUs, virtualized infrastructures and networked storage are driving the need for 20Gb/s InfiniBand which delivers leading efficiency of the entire IT computing and storage infrastructure. A Mellanox ConnectX IB 20Gb/s InfiniBand mezzanine card adapter can reside on each server blade in BladeSystem c3000 and c7000 enclosures to provide high-performance connectivity to the processor through a PCI Express interface. Each ConnectX IB mezzanine card adapter supports two ports and can connect to two independent InfiniBand switch modules, which also plug into the c3000 and c7000 enclosures, for redundancy and higher aggregated bandwidth – capabilities that are useful for mission-critical and mainstream commercial clustering applications. The ConnectX IB mezzanine card and IB switches are available for purchase now. The mezzanine card has been tested with OFED 1.2.5. The HP-supported software stacks for HPC applications (including HP-MPI) are expected to be available later this quarter.