the SSD Buyers Guide - click to see article
SSD buyers guide
PCI express SSDs list ..
PCIe SSDs
SSD SoCs controllers ..
SSD Controllers / IP

storagesearch.com

storage search
10 years - "leading the way to the new storage frontier"

InfiniBand

scroll down to see InfiniBand market milestones from 2000 to present day

... InfiniB page
Megabyte was going to catapult himself into
faster motion using proven rugged technology.
Fusion-io fast SSDs - click for more info
world's fastest production PCIe SSD
from Fusion-io
InfiniBand FAQs
the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide
What is the InfiniBand Ecosystem?
Cutting Through the Infiniband Buzz
Will InfiniBand be confined to a niche?
a Short History of Disk to Disk Backup
History of the SPARC Notebook Market
Has Infiniband Established Itself in the Market?
PCI Express and InfiniBand Form a Fruitful Marriage
the Power of InfiniBand and Clustered Storage (pdf)
Centralizing Server I/O Infrastructure with InfiniBand
Solid state disks, Disk to disk backup, RAID systems, Hard disk drives, storage news
network storage ad
Fusion-io Unveils InfiniBand SSD Card

Editor:- November 17, 2009 - Fusion-io today unveiled details of a very fast PCIe form factor, InfiniBand compatible, flash SSD designed for 2 undisclosed government customers.

The ioDrive Octal card, occupies 2 slots and delivers 800,000 IOPS (4k packet size), 6GB/s bandwidth and has upto 5TB maximum capacity (implemented by 8x ioMemory modules.

Each deployment consists of hundreds of terabytes of solid-state storage capacity and is capable of sustaining over one terabyte per second of aggregate bandwidth with access latencies under 50 microseconds.

“We were eager to take on the challenge of creating a device that meets the intense demands of high performance computing" said Steve Wozniak, Chief Scientist at Fusion-io. "With this architecture, IOPS are easy. We achieved over 100 million IOPS, more than enough performance to meet our customer’s requirements. The real power in our architecture was the ability to also scale bandwidth. We look forward to productizing the ioDrive Octal in the future, and bringing the power of this solid-state storage technology from the world of HPC to the enterprise.”


QLogic Ships 40Gbps InfiniBand Switches

Editor:- June 8, 2009 - QLogic today announced general availability of its 12000 Series 40Gb/sec QDR InfiniBand switches.

"With 864 ports and bandwidth of 51 terabits per second, the QLogic 12000 series is the highest capacity general purpose QDR InfiniBand switch on the market today," said David Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org. "The huge bandwidth of this solution brings HPC customers better scale-out performance, lower latencies, simpler management and reduced costs."

See also:- SAN switches, InfiniBand


New Module Aims at "must-have 100 terabytes SSD" Users

Editor:- April 21, 2009 - Texas Memory Systems announced the RamSan-620 - a 2U rackmount SLC Flash SSD with 2TB to 5TB capacity and 2 to 8 FC or InfiniBand ports.

Throughput is 3GB/s. R/W latency is 250µS and 80µS respectively. Transactional performance is 250,000 random IOPS. Power consumption is 325W. Multiple RamSan-620s can scale to higher capacities. Upto 100TB can fit in a single 40U rack.

"The IT community is looking for ways to increase storage efficiency while boosting productivity," said Greg Schulz, founding analyst at StorageIO and author of "The Green and Virtual Data Center".. "It is time to stop moving around I/O or other bottlenecks and start enabling storage efficiency via performance optimised storage that does more work, in a smaller footprint (power, cooling, floor-space, economic) while boosting productivity. Anyone can attach flash SSD to a computer or storage system; however the real trick and business benefit is when a storage system or applications server can fully utilise the technology without introduction of, or moving I/O and performance bottlenecks elsewhere. The RamSan-620 is an example of a new breed of storage solutions that have been optimised to leverage the capabilities of flash SSD while preserving application QoS and service level objectives."

Editor's comments:- there has been a lot of debate in the fastest lanes of the SSD accelerator market about whether it's better for users to deploy this technology inside the server box (as PCIe cards) - or outside the box (on the SAN). This is reminiscent of the old CISC vs RISC processor debates of the mid 1980s.

Entertaining as it is to analyze these polarized approaches I explained in my 2009 - Year of SSD Market Confusion and rackmount SSD articles why I believe that users will, in fact, do both.

Texas Memory Systems has in the past told me, that whenever they launch a new rackmount SSD they have some customers who just fill up a complete cabinet with the new model and use that as their basic unit of solid state storage until the next new model comes around. They'll only need 6.5kW for the 100TB SSD enabled by this model - and they'll get the transactional performance of 10,000 hard drives.


Fusion-io Unveils InfiniBand flash SSD

San Diego, Calif. - September 8, 2008 - Fusion-io unveiled the ioSAN - a 10GbE or Infiniband attached flash SSD on PCIe form factor.

Using a standards-based, memory-speed protocol over either 10GigE or 40GBps QDR InfiniBand, the ioSAN shares ioMemory capacity between servers. With latencies of less than 2 microseconds, the ioSAN incorporates an integrated network interface that can dynamically alternate between 10Gb/s Ethernet or 40Gb/s quad data rate InfiniBand. The built-in network interface makes it easy to create networked storage across servers with increased performance and flexibility, and with zero footprint. This networked storage is extremely easy to integrate and manage within existing server infrastructure. Prior to general availability of the ioSAN, Fusion-io is inviting innovative and visionary companies to join them as they launch their 3rd party development program at the beginning of next year.

"With this development, everything you thought you knew about SSD and storage networking is no longer true," said David Flynn, CTO of Fusion-io. "The ioSAN fuses SSD with storage networking, combining the best of direct-attached and storage networking with the best of SSD and traditional storage. With this revolutionary advancement, Fusion-io has commoditized high-performance network storage in the same way that companies like NVIDIA and ATI commoditized high-performance graphics processing. Fantastic applications of this technology are now beginning to emerge." ...Fusion-io profile, PCIe SSDs

Editor's comments:-
Fusion-io's full press release text says this is "the world's first networked enterprise SSD."

That's not strictly correct because fiber-channel SSDs have been available from many oems for over a decade. And it's not the first "ethernet NAS SSD" either. We ran an ad here in 2002 for the NAS-168F from IEI.

And it's not the first "enterprise NAS SSD". In April 2008 Nimbus Data Systems announced an SSD acceleration option for its Breeze Hybrid series of multi-protocol 10GbE IP storage systems.

And it's not the first InfiniBand SSD either. That was Texas Memory Systems in 2005.

What is special about Fusion-io's new product is that it could become the first high performance native NAS SSD to cross the chasm between PR-ware and success in the market. Although high speed NAS SSDs have been announced before on these storage news pages by various companies in years gone by none of them left a deep impression in the market. The reason? - the benefits of SSD acceleration were not cost effective when channeled through slow ethernet networks. The low cost of Fusion-io's flash array coupled with its high speed and 10GbE interface could place this product in new territory in the SSD roadmap.


40 Vendors Compatible with QLogic's InfiniBand Ecosystem

ALISO VIEJO, Calif - August. 4, 2008 - QLogic Corp. today announced a collaboration with 40 HPC vendors to validate InfiniBand network interoperability with over 50 different vertical applications, middleware, storage systems, cables and optics necessary to configure an HPC cluster.

QLogic and other industry leaders are collaborating to address the need for systematic certification of product interoperability and performance optimization to form pre-qualified HPC solutions. ...QLogic profile, InfiniBand


DataDirect Networks Expands Japanese Operations

TOKYO - July 1, 2008 - DataDirect Networks, Inc. today announced it is investing 0.5 billion yen (approx $5 million) to expand its sales and support operations throughout Japan.

This investment will fuel the company's expansion in these key sectors and enable it to accelerate its growth trajectory in the world's 2nd largest economy.

Analog TV broadcasting will end in Japan in July 2011, and the Association for the Promotion of Digital Broadcasting Japan recently announced that as of March, more than 32 million digital terrestrial television sets are already in use. With the transition to 100% digital environments, DataDirect Networks Japan is partnering with major broadcasters, post production and digital intermediate facilities to ensure a seamless transition to all digital content. ...DataDirect Networks profile, Storage Resellers in Japan


LSI and QLogic Cross Certify InfiniBand Products

MILPITAS, Calif - February 12, 2008 - QLogic Corp. and LSI Corp today announced that the 2 companies will be working together to cross-certify their InfiniBand based products.

LSI is actively involved in the QLogic HPCtrack Program in which InfiniBand companies collaborate to optimize the performance of multi-vendor solutions. ...LSI profile, ...QLogic profile


DataDirect Scales to X00 Gigabytes/ Second

Chatsworth, Calif - November 14, 2007 - DataDirect Networks Inc. today announced that the company's 8th generation S2A appliance will enable CFS/SUN's Lustre I/O to reach several hundred gigabytes / second.

DataDirect Networks manufactures the fastest, highest capacity, most scalable Lustre-based storage systems on the planet. Lustre, taken from the words "Linux" and "cluster," is a distributed file system used for large scale cluster computing. The file system, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in October, was designed to scale to tens of thousands of nodes that are attached to petabytes of storage. The main advantage of the file system is that it does not compromise a storage system's speed or security.

New features built into the latest S2A appliance include support for 8Gbps Fibre Channel and 20Gbps Infiniband DDR host connections. The system leverages the serial attached SCSI protocol to communicate to the drives it manages, providing a future-proof roadmap to the latest disk drive technologies, speeds and capacities. ...Data Direct Networks profile, SAN switches, Record Breaking Storage


Violin will Demo InfiniBand Memory Array at SC07

Iselin, NJ - October 24, 2007 - Violin Memory, Inc. will exhibit the Violin 1010 Memory Appliance at SC07 in Reno, NV next month.

The Violin1010 will be network attached to the SCinet InfiniBand network during the show. The network technologies and partners to enable this attachment will be announced at the tradeshow. ...Violin Memory profile, Storage Events


QLogic Shows Faster SAN Glue at SNW

SNW, DALLAS - October 16, 2007 - QLogic Corp today announced several new high-performance storage networking products.
  • First end-to-end family of 8Gbps Fibre Channel adapters and switches.
  • Low cost 2U 20Gbps InfiniBand switch - the SilverStorm 9020.
  • The industry's first FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) network adapters.
The technology is designed for "the new data center" - which consists of densely consolidated servers and storage resulting from the deployment of virtualization, blade servers and multi-core processors. QLogic says its new technology will provide the performance, quality-of-service and green networking needed in these "High RPM" data centers. ...QLogic profile

Editor's comments:-
I like the phrase "High RPM data center." But the fastest disks are "zero RPM".


Voltaire Reports 194% Revenue Growth

HERZELIYA, Israel - August 8, 2007 - Voltaire Ltd. today announced financial results for the 3 month period ended June 30, 2007.

Revenue increased by 194% to $11.7 million compared to Q206.

"This has been another strong quarter for Voltaire" said Ronnie Kenneth, Chairman and CEO. "During the quarter we shipped our new 20Gbps switch platform and continued to penetrate growth-oriented vertical markets..." ...Voltaire profile


QLogic's InfiniBand HCAs outSPEC the Rest

ALISO VIEJO, Calif - July 17, 2007 - QLogic Corp today announced that its InfiniBand adapters are the fastest based on a new benchmark suite just released by SPEC.

The SPEC MPI2007 suite measures the performance of message-passing interface applications and can be used to compare different hardware architectures, inter-connects, processors, memory hierarchy, compilers, and MPI implementations.

"Unlike micro-benchmarks, SPEC MPI2007 is very real-world, measuring performance based on a suite of actual end-user applications," said Amit Vashi, VP of marketing, QLogic Host Solutions Group. "HPC customers now have further validation that our InfiniBand HCAs outperform competitive products, hands down." ...QLogic profile, Storage ORGs, Record Breaking Storage


Mellanox Announces InfiniBand Market Milestone

editor- May 21, 2007 - Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. today announced that it has shipped over 2 million InfiniBand (10 and 20Gb/s) ports to OEMs.

More than 6 years after STORAGEsearch.com launched a dedicated directory page for InfiniBand in May 2001 most users have forgotten just how much this technology was once hyped.

For example IDC was once quoted as saying "75% of all servers shipped in 2004 will be shipped with InfiniBand connectivity." In fact that estimate was 100x too high. The need for InfiniBand functionality didn't go away - instead it was mostly implemented by on chip memory to memory access in multi-core processors. 10GbE also took a swipe out of the inter blade connection market. So today, InfiniBand is a small niche market instead of being the dominant technology which was once foretold.


Mellanox Demos 40Gb/s Connectivity Over Copper

SANTA CLARA, CA – April 16, 2007 – Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced the demonstration of a 40Gb/s InfiniBand server-to-server connection over a copper cable using advanced versions of the recently announced ConnectX IB Host Channel Adapter.

These are the first I/O adapters to support the increased performance of PCI Express 2.0 – a doubling of bus speeds expected to be integrated in server and storage platforms over the next year.

"This 40Gb/s demonstration is strong evidence that InfiniBand will continue to provide connectivity performance leadership for the industry's most demanding computing and storage applications, and it's software compatible with the InfiniBand installed base," said Shai Cohen, Mellanox's VP of operations and engineering at Technologies. ...Mellanox profile, Record Breaking Storage


InfiniBand Storage Powers Moviemakers

Los Angeles, CA - March 27, 2007 - DataDirect Networks announced today that Academy Award winning Ascent Media Creative Services has selected its technology (incorporated in SGI's RM660 and Infinite 6700) as the primary storage solution supporting 4K, 2K and HD post production and digital intermediate workflow.

SGI's RM660 and Infinite 6700 systems are based on DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance technology and is an ideal storage solution for creative environments. The S2A technology, with up to 3GB/s of sustained real-time throughput and up to 960TB of storage capacity, can easily scale to handle the bandwidth and capacity intensive requirements needed in the digital intermediate space, empowering true real-time collaborative workflow in digital post-production. ...Data Direct Networks profile, ...SGI profile, InfiniBand
.............................................................................................
InfiniBand Companies
FC SAN / iSCSI / NAS / RAID
3Com

Agilent Technologies

Aristos Logic

CATC

Crossroads Systems

Data Direct Networks

Dell Computer

EMC

Enhance Technology

Engenio

Exanet

FalconStor Software

Finisar

Fujitsu

Fusion-io

HP

IBM

InfiniBand Trade Association

InfiniCon Systems

InfiniFast

Intel

Isilon Systems

Linux Networx

LSI

Maximum Throughput

Mellanox Technologies

Meritec

Microsoft

Network Appliance

Norco Technologies

QLogic

Scali

SGI

Sun Microsystems

Terrascale Technologies

Texas Memory Systems

VIEO

Violin Memory

Voltaire

YottaYotta
still can't find it? check the acquired, dead & renamed list
iSCSI

solid state disks
Solid state disks
InfiniBand, first mentioned here on STORAGEsearch.com in June 2000, has been a graveyard for many startups which came into being to support this technology.

The original idea behind InfiniBand was that it would offer an industry standard alternative to the many high speed proprietary busses which server manufacturers used to cluster their most powerful servers.

The technology delivers 10 to 40Gps remote RAM access with very low latency.

The server recession in 2001-2003 slowed down the pace of new server developments and provided a disincentive for manufacturers to end of life their most profitable products.

2 other factors have reduced the potential market size for InfiniBand.

(1) - The availability of processor chips with multiple central processing units on the same chip has reduced the need for motherboard to motherboard memory access of the type provided by a factor of 2, 4 or 8 - for different chip implementations.

(2) - The availability of 10Gbps Ethernet, and the imminent 20GbE, provides a workable alternative in many blade to blade and box to box interconnect applications which would have looked like natural slots for InfiniBand when it was first proposed.

How Big is the InfiniBand Market?

In September 2006 the InfiniBand Trade Association estimated that over 500 end-user sites had deployed InfiniBand products in production applications.
.
the RamSan-440 is a 4U RAM SSD delivering 600,000 random IOPS - click for more info
RamSan-440 Enterprise Solid State Disk
512GB RAM SSD, 600,000 IOPS
from Texas Memory Systems
.
Charting the Rise of the InfiniBand Market (2000 to 2008)
This timeline tracks key InfiniBand events and market milestones, as they were recorded here on STORAGEsearch.

See also:- Google Trends - InfiniBand
  • June 2000 - first mention of InfiniBand. Hubert Yoshida, Vice President of Data Network Solutions at Hitachi Data Systems " ...As very large-capacity disk drives come to market for future generations of storage subsystems, these disk drives themselves may become bottlenecks to system performance... Adopting dual-ported Fibre Channel interface technology is the way to get faster back-end performance out of systems using the large disk drives... Infiniband standards, which are now being defined, bring the concept of switching into the processors to replace the shared PCI bus."
  • January 2001 - Intel announced it was shipping samples of its InfiniBand silicon and software products, critical components that will help implement the InfiniBand I/O industry specification and enable a key advance in Internet servers.
  • February 2001 - Mellanox Technologies introduced its InfiniBridge family of devices supporting the new InfiniBand architecture which includes Switches, Host Channel Adapters (HCAs), and Target Channel Adapters
  • February 2001 - first STORAGEsearch editor article mentioning InfiniBand. Re: Does a SAN need to include fibre-channel? - "To my way of thinking, circa 2001, "SAN" now encompasses the idea of any kind of significant storage system which can connect over some distance to a network, whether that connection is by fibre-channel, ethernet, the internet, or in the future InfiniBand... I think the SAN market today is like the PC market before Microsoft, and the networking market before Cisco. Nobody really knows who is going to create the standards which are going to be the winners."
  • April 2001 - DAFS - a new file access protocol, specifically designed to take advantage of standard memory-to-memory interconnect technologies such as InfiniBand in high-performance clustered data center environments - was 75% defined.
  • April 2001 - Paceline Systems became the first of many hopeful InfiniBand focused startups - and raised $20 million in financing from top-tier venture capitalists. "IDC predicts the InfiniBand switch port opportunity will exceed $1 billion by 2004."
  • May 2001 - STORAGEsearch started a dedicated directory for InfiniBand (this page). "Infiniband was one of the top 5 words or phrases searched using the on-site search-engine during the month preceding."
  • June 2001 - InfiniCon Systems published first of a series of educational articles about InfiniBand.
  • June 2001 - InfiniSwitch quoted a market projection "Research from IDC estimates that more than 75% of all servers shipped in 2004 will be shipped with InfiniBand connectivity." - Most of IDC's projections about storage interface technologies at that time were much too optimistic. This resulted in many startup companies going bust in later years - because the markets in InfiniBand (and iSCSI - the other big analyst hyped subject) weren't big enough to feed them.
  • August 2001 - Intel announced several interoperability demos including the world's largest InfiniBand fabric to date, which featured 24 vendors and over 100 InfiniBand devices.
  • October 2001 - InfiniCon Systems announced that it will work with IBM to integrate IBM's InfiniBand chip technology - known as InfiniBlue - into sharable I/O solutions to be offered by InfiniCon Systems.
  • January 2002 - JNI announced a strategic alliance with InfiniSwitch Corp.
  • February 2002 - Voltaire demonstrated its TCP Termination product architecture - which connected InfiniBand to existing IP networks
  • March 2002 - we started seeing the first of the InfiniBand startups go bust. The assets of Essential Communications were acquired by SBS Technologies

    Also in March 28, 2002 - Overland Data, Inc announced a strategic alliance with InfiniCon Systems to collaborate on InfiniBand-based solutions for Overland's Neo series tape libraries.
  • May 2002 - On its first anniversary - the InfiniBand directory on STORAGEsearch.com was ranked #24 out of the pages viewed by readers. Just below disk to disk backup.
  • July 2002 - view this InfiniBand page and news back in time.
  • September 2002 - InfiniCon Systems announced general availability of its InfinIO 7000 Shared I/O Systems - the first commercially available I/O system based on InfiniBand using 10Gbps channel speed.
  • May 2003 - On its second anniversary - the InfiniBand directory on STORAGEsearch.com was ranked #39 out of the pages viewed by readers. In the same month SATA was #1.
  • May 2003 - first vendor independent InfiniBand training workshops launched by CATC and Dashcourses.
  • August 2003 - InfiniCon Systems announced that its InfinIO family of products - leveraging InfiniBand architecture - using the industry-standard IP-over-InfiniBand (IPoIB) protocol, applications drove data in excess of 350MB/second for a single link, compared to an average of 65MB/second for a Gigabit Ethernet link.
  • November 2003 - SBS Technologies introduced the IB4X-PMC-2 Host Channel Adapter - the first InfiniBand HCA to be provided on a PCI mezzanine card (PMC).
  • February 2004 - Mellanox announced that more than 200,000 InfiniBand ports have been shipped to its customers.
  • March 2004 - Topspin Communications announced the industry's first intelligent Boot over InfiniBand solution.
  • May 2004 - On its third anniversary - the InfiniBand directory on STORAGEsearch.com was ranked #36 out of the pages viewed by readers. In the same month solid state disks was #1.

    Also in May 2004 wannabe InfiniBand startup Banderacom (which had exited the InfiniBand market due to its small size and poor prospects) renamed itself and re-emerged as NetEffect - with $22 million to pursue the high-performance, multi-gigabit Ethernet market.
  • June 2004 - IWILL selected Mellanox's InfiniHost host channel adapter to provide 10Gb/s Landed on Motherboard connections for the DK8S2-IB server platform - the world's first server with 10Gb/s network connectivity shipped standard with every system.
  • December 2004 - Infiniband was identified as one of the storage market "Dogs Which Didn't Bark" in STORAGEsearch.com's end of year review.
  • January 2005 - STORAGEsearch.com's Solid State Disk Buyer Market Survey showed that InfiniBand came in 9th - cited by just 6% of SSD buyers in response to the question - "Which interfaces best suit your current or future SSD requirements?"
  • May 2005 - On its fourth anniversary - the InfiniBand directory on STORAGEsearch.com was ranked #31 out of the pages viewed by readers. In the same month NAS was #1.
  • June 2005 - Voltaire announced $15 million in further financing taking its total to $65 million investment. STORAGEsearch commented on InfiniBand's slower than predicted adoption in the market. "The original benefit of a faster storage connection has got more fuzzy as other technologies have also speeded up. It's also possible that new technologies like multi-core processors in which CPUs share access to the same memory bus inside the same chip have eroded some of the multiprocessing benefits which InfiniBand's proponents originally had in mind."
  • October 2005 - InfiniBand is 33rd most popular subject viewed by STORAGEsearch.com's readers.
  • June 2006 - Voltaire ships InfiniBand-based switching solution and software stack to support Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (Microsoft's official new entry into the world of HPC).
  • October 2006 - InfiniBand is 28th most popular subject viewed by STORAGEsearch.com's readers.
  • November 2006 - InfiniBand (re)entered the top 20 storage searches by STORAGEsearch.com readers - at #18

storage search banner

STORAGEsearch.com 1.0" SSDs 1.8" SSDs 2.5" SSDs 3.5" SSDs (c)PCI(e) SSDs rackmount SSDs

STORAGEsearch is published by ACSL