Nov 17 2008
Obsidian Strategics(TM), the leader in InfiniBand range extension through its Longbow(TM) family of products, and ADVA Optical Networking, a leading provider of Optical+Ethernet solutions for data, storage, voice and video services, today announced a partnership that would bring the first-ever 100G/bits DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) InfiniBand link to the market. The joint solution combines new Obsidian Longbow C Series(TM) and high-capacity ADVA Optical Networking optical transport technologies, uniquely enabling a powerful new class of storage-area network, cluster-clustering, remote visualization and data center-expansion applications. The technology will be demonstrated at the 2008 SuperComputing conference in Austin, Tx., booth # 1344.
InfiniBand is primarily used as a fast and scalable fabric interconnect for linking compute and storage nodes within a high-performance data center. The protocol is usually limited to very short-reach cables unsuitable for applications between buildings. The Obsidian-ADVA Optical Networking technology combination offers this same performance over tens of kilometers – scaling to up to 80 4X SDR InfiniBand links through a single dedicated fiber pair.
“Many-core processors, high-capacity disks and solid-state storage technologies are resulting in exponentially growing volumes of data being accessed ever more rapidly,” says Dr. David Southwell, president of Obsidian Strategics. “However, these data sets are increasingly trapped by the walls of their data centers – traditional long-haul networking is not keeping up and the time required to routinely move Petabytes of data is often prohibitive. Longbow technology allows the use of InfiniBand as an alternative to TCP/IP, leveraging faster InfiniBand hardware and bypassing the latency and bandwidth efficiency problems that plague lossy transport protocols over high bandwidth-delay product links. Striping parallel InfiniBand links over ADVA Optical Networking’s DWDM equipment provides the means to scale network capacity alongside compute and storage.”
Adds Dr. Christoph Glingener, chief technology officer for ADVA Optical Networking, “The partnership between ADVA Optical Networking and Obsidian delivers strong technology to drive InfiniBand over longer distances. InfiniBand has been limited in the past, due to the inability to transport the protocol over distance. WDM can deliver protocol-agnostic transport for latency-sensitive protocols like InfiniBand, enabling this partnership to provide an excellent solution for demanding, high-capacity applications.”
The FSP3000 xWDM platform from ADVA Optical Networking supports a multitude of data center applications for enterprise and R&E customers. It was developed with the most stringent requirements in mind regarding latency and power consumption typical for these environments. The platform supports the transparent transmission of up to 80 wavelengths over unregenerated distances of up to 2,000km. The addition of InfiniBand to the FSP 3000 feature set marks another milestone in a long history of qualifications achieved with major storage and server vendors.
Longbow C Series products transparently extend InfiniBand fabrics over up to 40km of lightpath – fully retaining InfiniBand performance and connection semantics. Longbow C products operate in pairs, transparently range-extending 4X SDR IB at full bandwidth and sub-microsecond device latencies over dedicated fibers or DWDM channels. The C Series comprises five different models that vary in optical interfaces and range-extension capability.
This is the second time ADVA Optical Networking and Obsidian have collaborated to scale InfiniBand capabilities. The first time was in June 2008, when the companies announced an integrated capability to extend InfiniBand connections to 40km without performance degradation. The solution was successfully tested in Germany at the University of Stuttgart’s High Performance Computing Center (HLRS), which provides systems, tools and expertise for public and private supercomputing development projects.