Mellanox Technologies has announced that its FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand adapters and switches accelerate Microsoft’s new SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse appliance. InfiniBand enables Microsoft to offer new functionality and deliver higher performance and scalability while reducing the hardware footprint to enable the lowest total cost of ownership. Benchmarks show that the new appliance enables completion of a warehouse query of over 1,000 Terabytes of data in less than two seconds, compared to the previous generation’s completion time of two minutes with just 100 Terabytes of data.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) is a scalable data warehouse appliance that delivers performance and scalability through massively parallel processing connected by a single high-speed 56Gb/s InfiniBand interconnect. PDW takes advantage of Windows Servers 2012 SMB Direct protocol to support storage access over native RDMA, and can use Mellanox interconnect solutions to accelerate access to storage by 10X.

“Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse is an enterprise class appliance that was built for integration with Big Data and that can handle the most demanding data requiring very high scalability and performance,” said Mark Jewett, Director, Server and Tools Marketing, at Microsoft. “By taking advantage of storage innovations in Windows Server 2012, Mellanox benchmarks demonstrate that their RDMA interconnect solutions can help increase network speed significantly for data warehouse queries.”

“Modern database applications require higher performance, scalability and availability, placing increased demands on the server and storage interconnect,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing development at Mellanox Technologies. “When using Mellanox’s RDMA-based InfiniBand interconnect solutions with Windows Server 2012 in-box support, Microsoft’s SQL Server 2012 PDW customers will achieve outstanding application performance and business benefits.”