InfiniBand extension makes real-time data synchronization, backup, and disaster recovery practical between systems thousands of kilometers apart: Network Equipment Technologies, Inc. (NET) today announced that Colfax International, a global supplier of high-performance enterprise computing systems, will offer NET’s NX5000 Series InfiniBand bridging solutions to its marquee customer base of large corporations, educational institutions, R&D laboratories and government agencies. By doing so, Colfax International will enable customers to create extremely high-performance virtual clusters using systems located in multiple sites across their campuses and WANs. NET’s NX5000 solutions can extend InfiniBand fabrics over thousands of kilometers to provide multi-Gigabit connectivity between geographically dispersed servers and storage. These easy-to-manage, small-footprint systems significantly outperform TCP/IP-based alternatives in terms of bandwidth scalability and low latency - enabling the real-time data synchronization, backup, and disaster recovery required for building virtual clusters across large distances. Companies in a broad range of industries are looking to cluster geographically dispersed IT infrastructure in order to achieve new levels of performance and ensure business continuity. As they seek to consolidate data center resources virtually, rather than physically, their requirements for high bandwidth/low latency connectivity are intensifying. NET’s NX5000 solutions fulfill these requirements in an easy-to-manage, small-footprint package. “To successfully cluster resources across large distances, IT organizations must ensure that core computing tasks such as the synchronization of SAN silos occur in real time,” said Matthew Krueger, NET’s vice president of business development. “We are gratified that a market leader like Colfax International - which works with organizations deploying some of the most demanding computing applications in the world - has selected NET’s NX5000 Series InfiniBand extension solution for these applications.” “NET’s NX5000 Series is the perfect complement to the high performance computing clusters being deployed by our customers,” said Gautam Shah, President and CEO of Colfax International. “With more and more organizations hosting mission-critical and data-intensive applications on purpose-built clusters, the need for very high speed disaster recovery alternatives has become acute. With the NX5000 Series’ ability to bridge InfiniBand fabrics across sites, our customers now have the optimum solution for synchronizing SAN silos in real time and for maintaining truly virtual computing resources in multiple physical locations.” NET’s NX5000 solutions complement Mellanox Technologies’ InfiniBand adapter solutions, which Colfax International is already using at customer sites to create high performance virtual clusters. “Providing an effective way to connect remote InfiniBand facilities without performance degradation is the key for global virtualization of servers and storage,” said Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “We are happy to support the collaboration between Colfax International and NET to deliver InfiniBand-based virtual high-performance solutions.”