Emulex is proud to be a new member of the IBTA. The IBTA has a great history of furthering the InfiniBand and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) specifications, developing an active solution ecosystem and building market momentum around technologies with strong value propositions. We are excited to be a voting member on the Organization’s Steering Committee and look forward tocontributing to relevant technical and marketing working groups, as well as participating in IBTA-sponsored Plugfests and other interoperability activities.
Why the IBTA?
Through our experience in building high performance, large-scale, mission critical networks we understand the benefits of RDMA. Since its original implementation as part of InfiniBand back in 1999, RDMA has a well-proven track record of delivering better application performance, reduced CPU overhead and increased bandwidth efficiency in demanding computing environments.
Due to increased adoption of technologies such as cloud computing, big data analytics, virtualization and mobile computing, more and more commercial IT infrastructures are starting to run into the same challenges that supercomputing was forced to confront around performance bottlenecks, resource utilization and moving large data sets. In other words, data centers supporting the Fortune 2000, vertical applications for media and entertainment or life sciences, telecommunications and cloud service providers are starting to look a lot more like the data centers at research institutions or systems on the TOP500 . Thus, with the advent of RoCE, we see an opportunity to bring the benefits of RDMA that have been well-proven in high performance computing (HPC) markets to the mainstream commercial markets.
RoCE is a key enabling technology for converging data center infrastructure and enabling application centric I/O across a broad spectrum of requirements. From supercomputing to share drives, RDMA deliveries broad based benefits for fundamentally more efficient network communications. Emulex has a data center vision to connect, monitor and manage on a single unified fabric. We are looking forward to supporting the IBTA, contributing to the advancement of RoCE and helping to bring RDMA to mainstream markets.
Jon Affeld, senior director, marketing alliances at Emulex