SCIENCE

Obsidian Strategics is claiming that a new technology which has just been granted a US Patent & Trademark Office patent (7,843,962) “holds the key to enterprise class business continuity and disaster recovery.”

The new patent is for a ‘Method to Extend the Physical Reach of an InfiniBand Network’ and relates to a high performance network technology technology marketed by Obsidian under the Longbow brand.

Today’s businesses are out-pacing conventional network technologies leaving CIOs across all sectors struggling with the growing demands of a new era of data collection, storage and management. Increasingly, they are looking to the high performance network industry to solve problems such as:

* Live migration of large data sets to remote content delivery sites;
* Efficient disaster recovery across regional and global distances;
* Fault tolerant ‘stretched’ database clusters across metro area networks;
* Synchronous storage mirroring over a 50 mile range;
* Seamless data center expansion to nearby buildings.

Essential to solving these problems is the ability to make efficient use of existing fiber optic networks and do so in a fast, secure, reliable manner. Initially developed to support global mission critical links for the US military, Obsidian’s Longbow products are high performance range extenders with throughput efficiency reaching 96 percent+ over standard 10Gb connections as compared to less than 15 percent for TCP/IP. Equally dramatic is the latency advantage, measured at an order of magnitude lower, on large-scale, single streams of data with minimal jitter.