Advantages of InfiniBand
Powerful multi-core CPUs, server virtualization, blade architectures,
increasing storage demands, and the need to reduce power usage all place
increasing demands on I/O solutions. InfiniBand meets these demands
with:
- Superior performance. InfiniBand is the only shipping solution
that supports 20Gb/s host connectivity and 60Gb/s switch to switch
links.
- Low Latency. InfiniBand's ultra-low latencies, with measured
delays of 1μs end to end, greatly accelerate many data center and
high-performance computing (HPC) applications.
- High efficiency. InfiniBand provides direct support of advanced
reliable transport protocols such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) to
enhance the efficiency of customer workload processing.
- Cost effectiveness. InfiniBand Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) and
switches are very competitively priced and create a compelling
price/performance advantage over alternative technologies.
- Fabric consolidation and low energy usage. With less than 5W per
20Gb/s port, InfiniBand can consolidate networking, clustering, and storage
data over a single fabric which significantly lowers the overall
power, real estate, and management overhead required for servers and
storage. Enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities support running and
managing multiple workloads and traffic classes.
- Reliable, stable connections. InfiniBand is perfectly suited to
meet the mission critical needs of today's enterprise by enabling fully
redundant and lossless I/O fabrics, with automatic path failover and link
layer multi-pathing abilities to meet the highest levels of
availability.
- Data integrity. Mission critical applications require that data
has not been corrupted as it travels across the fabric. InfiniBand enables
the highest levels of data integrity by performing cyclic redundancy checks
(CRCs) at each fabric hop and end-to-end across the fabric to ensure the
data is correctly transferred.
- Rich, growing ecosystem. InfiniBand is at the center of an
ecosystem that includes open-source software distribution from the
OpenFabrics Alliance, innovative and cost-effective cabling, and long-haul
solutions that reach outside the data center and across the globe.
These advantages combine to make InfiniBand the industry’s most powerful
interconnect.
