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InfiniBand for Storage Applications

With the advantage of high bandwidth and low latency, InfiniBand is being rapidly deployed in data centers and high performance computing clusters. Many customers are now using InfiniBand to meet their storage connectivity needs.

Compared to alternative storage interconnect technologies like Fibre Channel and iSCSI, InfiniBand offers significant performance and price improvements. This translates into real world customer advantages such as increased application performance, reduced backup times, greater system consolidation, lower power consumption and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

There are many performance sensitive applications that are driving the need for InfiniBand storage:

• Backup / Diskless Backup
• Server Clustering
• Replication / Snapshot / Data Check-pointing
• Streaming Video / Graphics
• Clustered Storage for Disaster Recovery
• Online Transaction processing
• Data warehousing

With a growing number of available InfiniBand storage devices, connecting directly to the InfiniBand fabric is now a reality.

Growing number of InfiniBand storage solutions

InfiniBand Storage Area Networks can be seamlessly implemented, while protecting previous investments in legacy Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NAS storage devices by using IB to FC and IB to IP gateway products from leading vendors like Cisco, Qlogic and Voltaire. These gateway solutions are now qualified with leading storage products such as Network Appliance’s FAS series.

InfiniBand Storage Area Networking

With proven reliability, scalability, ultra low latencies, 20Gb/s performance and a clear roadmap to 40Gb/s, InfiniBand excels at meeting the needs for both block and file access storage applications.

Equally important for storage is support for RDMA, data integrity, QoS and InfiniBand’s channel I/O architecture.

• RDMA enables storage protocols such as SRP, iSER and NFSoRDMA to move data directly between the memory of computer systems and storage devices with zero memory copy, low latency and low CPU overhead. These advantages directly increase application performance by efficiently using system resources.
• Enterprise Data Centers require assurance that data is correctly written to the storage device and has not been corrupted as it travels from server to storage media. 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 read and written between server and storage device.
• The InfiniBand architecture supports channels-based IO (see figure below) with the ability to allocate and guarantee bandwidth per I/O channel for a full QoS solution. Without this capability, administrators have to over provision their storage and networking fabrics and use multiple adapters to meet performance demands. Consolidating I/O to one wire that can meet the most demanding I/O requirement significantly lowers both the initial installation and ongoing management costs. This is quickly becoming a key data center requirement.

InfiniBand Storage Area Networking

Clustered File Systems and InfiniBand

InfiniBand is used by many customers deploying clustered file systems such as Luster, HP’s Storageworks Scalable File Share, IBRIX’s FusionFS and Z Research’s GlusterFS. Clustered file systems are deployed by customers with requirements that need to scale beyond traditional file systems. By combining these clustered file systems with InfiniBand, customers can meet their most demanding I/O workloads.

InfiniBand Storage for New Data Centers

InfiniBand’s high bandwidth, low latency, dedicated I/O channels, QoS and RDMA features can lower capital expenses and operating costs making it the right choice for storage and fabric consolidation.

Industry Standard and Open Source Solutions

InfiniBand is an industry-standard specification defined by the InfiniBand Trade Association that defines an input/output architecture used to interconnect servers, communications infrastructure equipment, storage and embedded systems.

The OpenFabrics Alliance is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to expanding and accelerating the adoption of RDMA technologies for server and storage connectivity. Members are cooperating to develop open source software that is released via the validated OFED software stack. Alliance members include leading chip manufacturers, database providers, national laboratories, network equipment manufacturers, server & storage providers, software companies, workstation manufacturers, and more. This cooperative effort accelerates adoption, improves quality and ensures interoperability.