STORAGE

The InfiniBand Trade Association today announced that it has released a new annex to the specification providing support for iSER over InfiniBand. The iSER annex extends InfiniBand's support for high performance storage. At 10-20 Gbps bitrates, InfiniBand's performance is now more than triple that of FibreChannel, and at only half the cost. Subsequently, InfiniBand has six times the price performance advantage of FibreChannel. iSER is a new IETF standard extension to iSCSI that includes support for RDMA-enabled networks such as InfiniBand; the new annex closes the loop by mapping the iSER extensions onto InfiniBand. The combination of iSER and InfiniBand's unsurpassed performance brings significantly greater performance to iSCSI while leveraging iSCSI's existing comprehensive management capabilities. This allows heterogeneous storage environments to utilize a single protocol and management infrastructure while taking advantage of InfiniBand's performance and channel characteristics. "Solutions using iSER can leverage iSCSI's rich management capabilities and InfiniBand's high performance," said Arun Taneja, analyst from Taneja Group. "Now iSCSI is capable of supporting the demanding storage and uptime requirements of enterprise data centers." iSER combined with InfiniBand, the only RDMA standard available today, provides the ideal solution for enterprise and technical computing grids that require high performance clustering and storage. As iSER is standards-based and no changes need to be made to use the technology, a user can protect his technology investment. "iSER is based on iSCSI I/O and management protocols/processes and provides these rich features with a traditional iSCSI look and feel," said John Hufferd, senior executive director of technology at Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. and co-author of the iSER extension to iSCSI. "This means we have a set of SCSI I/O and management protocols that will operate on normal TCP/IP networks, iWarp (RDMA TCP/IP) networks and now on InfiniBand networks. iSER makes iSCSI available and operationally ready for the enterprise." iSER has a comprehensive set of storage networking capabilities enabling features such as: plug and play deployment, name services, automated discovery, security, automated error and failure recovery, change modifications, load balancing and standard management interfacing. iSER is in production quality as part of the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) and is available in leading Linux distributions from Red Hat and Novell/SuSE. iSER is also part of the recently-released kernel 2.6.18. FalconStor Software, LSI Logic, SGI and Voltaire are currently working on iSER-based InfiniBand storage products. Many other solutions are planned for release within the next year.