The list of InfiniBand products hitting the market grew this week when InfiniSwitch Corp. announced the general availability of three products designed for InfiniBand-enabled devices.
The Westboro, Mass., company released the InfiniSwitch 12/24 Port Leaf Switch, the Lane15 Fabric Manager-Enterprise Version and the InfiniSwitch Dual Port Host Channel Adapter (HCA).
The Leaf Switch offers 12 to 24 ports in a 1U configuration, according to InfiniSwitch CEO Alisa Nessler. It features redundant switch cards for high availability, redundant hot-swappable power and cooling devices, and a built-in management interface. The low-latency switch also is integrated with Hewlett-Packard Co.s OpenView and IBMs Tivoli NetView management and monitoring software.
The Lane15 Fabric Manager, which Nessler said is designed to speed up the maintenance of the fabric, includes a point-and-click GUI that enables more intuitive management of the InfiniBand subnet, performance management capabilities, and failover and recovery features.
The host channel adapter is aimed at clustering and network connectivity and features expandable memory of up to 128MB, support for dual 10GB link speed, and driver support for SuSE AGs SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat Inc.s Advanced Server and Microsoft Corp.s Windows 2000 operating systems.
A price of $44,050 includes a full 24-node configuration, the switch, HCAs and fabric management software.
InfiniSwitchs products, released Tuesday, have received certification in IBMs ServerProven Program, an indication that they will install and run easily on IBM systems, in this case the Intel-based xSeries servers.
Nessler said the IBM announcement was the latest indication of InfiniBand acceptance among top-tier systems vendors, something the interconnect technology was lacking until this year.
“Its incredibly important,” Nessler said. “It makes the difference as we bring these [products] into the marketplace.”
InfiniBand is a channel-based, switched-fabric architecture that has been in the works for several years. Late last year, Dell Computer Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. joined IBM in announcing they would be releasing InfiniBand-enabled products in the coming years.
Also, late last month, Sun announced a partnership with InfiniBand company Topspin Communications Inc., another show of top-tier support for the technology.
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