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Tech Road Map: Keep An Eye On Virtual I/O: Page 2 of 4

To InfiniBand And Beyond

The first alternative to FCoE, championed by InfiniBand vendors Voltaire and Mellanox, connects the servers to InfiniBand switches and uses InfiniBand-to-Ethernet and Fibre Channel bridges to connect to a data center's LAN and SAN resources.

InfiniBand is best known as the high-speed (up to 40 Gbps), lossless, low-latency interconnect at the heart of most high-performance computing clusters. Advocates promote it as the Swiss Army knife of networks, good for remote direct memory access (RDMA) in high-performance computing, IP transport, and even storage connections in applications. On the plus side, InfiniBand solutions bring two to four times the bandwidth of even 10-Gbps Ethernet for server-to-server I/O functions like VM migration.

Voltaire has a 10-Gbps Ethernet/InfiniBand line card that has two 10-Gbps Ethernet ports and 22 10/20-Gbps InfiniBand ports, for its Grid Director 2004 and 2012 switches. The host can use an IP-over-InfiniBand driver and the InfiniBand switch provides Layer 2 bridging and Layer 3 and 4 routing to the Ethernet ports for data networking. For storage access, Voltaire has a storage router with two 10/20 Gbps InfiniBand ports and four 4-Gbps Fibre Channel ports. Hosts use iSCSI or iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) and the storage router maps iSCSI targets to Fibre Channel logical unit numbers.

At first glance, Mellanox's BridgeX looks very much like the Voltaire approach, with a bridge appliance that has four 40-Gbps InfinBand ports facing the servers and 16 8-Gbps Fibre Channel ports or 12 10-Gbps Ethernet ports facing networks and/or storage. Mellanox's ConnectX cards have dual personalities, so each port can act as a 40-Gbps InfiniBand HBA, like the Voltaire solution, or a 10-Gbps Ethernet port.