INDUSTRY

Topspin Communications today announced that it has augmented its server virtualization capabilities with the industry's first intelligent Boot over InfiniBand solution, allowing standard diskless servers to be deployed in a "stateless" fashion and enabling customers to provision any combination of application, operating system, storage, and I/O resources to a server on-demand in just the time it takes to reboot. This function paves the way for emerging blade server solutions, which offer customers a lower cost and higher density option than traditional server packages with reduced power consumption and improved reliability. "Boot capabilities are simply the next natural evolution for InfiniBand," said Steve Duplessie, founder of the Enterprise Storage Group. "InfiniBand is the de facto choice for high performance -- and now large-scale clusters -- for all the major systems players, so a boot ability was imperative. InfiniBand is what is going to make server virtualization and the whole blade movement meaningful." Topspin's Boot over InfiniBand solution set will consist of a new "remote-boot" version of its host channel adapter (HCA), a Topspin Server Switch, and one or more of Topspin's Ethernet or Fibre Channel gateways for connecting to the application images in NAS or SAN, respectively. Application and OS images are deposited in storage and tracked by the appropriate Topspin gateway. When a server needs to have an image provisioned to it, the remote-boot HCA points the server to the proper image in storage and boots the server over the network with that image. The Topspin Server Switch in turn provides the cross-connects and mappings to bring I/O and storage resources to the new server/application pair. This process, the ability to centrally manage application images and re-purpose servers on the fly, can dramatically cut provisioning time for new applications -- from days or hours to the seconds or minutes it takes to reboot a server -- and significantly reduce down-time for mission critical applications. "Booting over InfiniBand would help us significantly reduce our costs of scaling large clusters," said Wally Edmondson, systems administrator at the University of Tennessee SimCenter at Chattanooga. "By eliminating local disk and our separate boot network, we believe we can cut our management costs in half by eliminating the most common point of failure in the server. The cluster will become simpler to manage, and time to boot the cluster will decrease." "This is a major milestone on our path to delivering a complete server virtualization solution," said Stu Aaron, vice president of Marketing and Product Management at Topspin. "With features like Boot over InfiniBand, we are continuing to enhance our server switch offerings, giving our customers the ability to build large server clusters, and seamlessly transition those clusters into a grid for server virtualization." Topspin's Boot over InfiniBand solution is in trials today and will be generally available at the end of the month. Topspin's solution will be on display this week in Topspin booth #205 at the Server Blade Summit in San Jose, California.