IBM, Voltaire Team on InfiniBand for DB2

Voltaire Inc. is offering users of IBMs DB2 database technology a way to run their transaction-heavy applications on cheaper, entry-level servers linked by InfiniBand interconnect technology rather than on larger—and more expensive—high-end systems.

At the LinuxWorld conference this week in New York, Voltaire will be part of a demonstration in which four enterprise applications—SAP R/3, mySAP CRM, mySAP Business Intelligence and IBM WebSphere Application Server—will run with IBMs DB2 Universal Database for Linux, according to officials with Voltaire, in Bedford, Mass. The demonstration will run the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system on a 40-node cluster of Intel-based IBM eServer xSeries 330 systems.

Linking the servers will be InfiniBand technology from Voltaire, including its flagship nVigor switch router, said Asaf Somekh, marketing director at Voltaire. The company is expected to release an enhanced version of the technology—which will be renamed InfiniBand Switch Router—later this quarter, Somekh said. Powering the InfiniBand connection will be 10G-bps—or 4X&3151;chips from Mellanox Corp.

InfiniBand is a channel-based, switched-fabric architecture. Originally predicted to replace other interconnect technologies, it appears now that it will at first gain traction in such areas as supercomputing and high-performance clustering.

Somekh said InfiniBand will enable businesses to save money—seeing savings of up to 80 percent on hardware costs—by buying less-costly low-end servers and linking them via the interconnect technology.

“This is exactly what InfiniBand is all about,” he said. “They actually achieve the same performance of midrange servers with these dramatic [hardware] savings.”