INDUSTRY

QLogic Corp, a leading supplier of high performance network infrastructure solutions, today announced an OEM agreement with IBM for quad data rate (QDR) highly scalable InfiniBand switches targeted at the high performance computing (HPC) market.

Under the terms of the agreement, IBM will offer QLogic’s 12000 Series 40Gb/s QDR InfiniBand switches as part of IBM’s new Dynamic Infrastructure portfolio, a suite of services and products designed to bring more intelligence, automation, integration, and efficiencies to both digital and physical infrastructures.

Organizations supported by IBM Dynamic Infrastructure can deliver superior business and IT services with agility and speed, while enhancing performance, scalability and addressing day-to-day operational needs to improve service, reduce costs and manage risk. Dynamic Infrastructure helps provide needed business continuity and high availability solutions to facilitate cloud computing and grid computing architectures.

QLogic 12000 Series QDR InfiniBand switches were selected based on their significant advantages over comparative products, including offering 160 percent more connectivity options (864 ports); 100 percent more aggregate bandwidth (51.8 terabits per second); and up to 20 percent less power consumption (7.8 watts per port). IBM also selected the 12000 Series in large part due to the QLogic InfiniBand Fabric Suite, which simplifies InfiniBand networking with automated installation, configuration, and monitoring of the fabric. The InfiniBand Fabric Suite also provides QoS and flexible fabric partitioning that improves the utilization of InfiniBand resources and adapts to the evolving requirements of an organization.

“IBM is working with ecosystem partners like QLogic and our thousands of clients to link today’s intelligent, mobile infrastructure to powerful back-end systems,” said Alex Yost, vice president, System x and BladeCenter, IBM. “With the ability to give customers quicker times-to-solutions through QDR speeds and intelligent features, QLogic 12000 Series InfiniBand switches enable our clients to process all this data, and apply advanced analytics in real-time.”  

Commenting on today’s announcement, Jesse Parker, vice president and general manager, Network Solutions Group, QLogic, said, “With real-time performance and volumetric efficiency so crucial to next-generation data centers, IBM is providing its customers with the industry’s most advanced line of InfiniBand switches for the enterprise. This OEM agreement leverages the complementary strengths of IBM and QLogic and will enable us to provide the InfiniBand data backbone that enables IBM’s Dynamic Infrastructure model to intelligently, automatically and securely move workloads in a high-performance data center—anytime and anywhere.”

The QLogic 12000 Series of edge and director switches, based on the company’s TrueScale™ Architecture, includes several innovations that make the company’s latest technology unparalleled in every respect:

• Highest scalability for a modular switch: 18 to 864 ports

• Highest ports per 1u of rack space for a director switch: 29.8 ports

• Highest leaf port count: 24 ports

• Lowest power consumption per port

InfiniBand Networks powered by QLogic

QLogic offers a comprehensive, end-to-end portfolio of InfiniBand networking products for HPC including QDR host channel adapters (HCAs), QDR multi-protocol director and edge switches and the necessary tools to install, operate, and maintain high performance fabrics. Delivering the industry's highest message rate, lowest MPI latency and highest effective bandwidth, QLogic InfiniBand adapters enable MPI and TCP applications to scale to thousands of nodes with unprecedented price-performance. As the most comprehensive and flexible HPC cluster interconnect fabric solutions on the market, QLogic QDR InfiniBand switches incorporate the industry’s only management tools that enable an administrator to install and boot an InfiniBand fabric in minutes, helping to accommodate the growing demand for high performance computational clusters and grids.