About InfiniBand

The popularity of the Internet and the demand for 24x7 uptime is driving system performance and reliability requirements to levels that today's standard I/O interconnect architectures can no longer support. Data storage elements, web, application and database servers, and enterprise computing is driving the need for fail-safe, always-available systems offering ever-higher performance. The trend in the industry is to move storage out of the server to isolated storage networks and distribute data across fault tolerant RAID arrays. With processor clock speeds passing the gigahertz threshold and network bandwidth exceeding one gigabit per second, there is a need for a new I/O interconnect offering maximum availability and higher bandwidth to support and scale with today's internet technology.

InfiniBand is a point-to-point high-speed switch fabric interconnect architecture that features built-in quality of service, fault tolerance and scalability. The InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) Specification defines the interconnect (fabric) technology for interconnecting processor nodes and I/O nodes to form a system area network that is independent of the host operating system and processor platform. See the InfiniBand Trade Association for more details on the InfiniBand specification and IBTA events.

See Mellanox's white paper "Introduction to InfiniBand" for an overview of InfiniBand technology.