InfiniCon Systems Inc. on Monday unveiled InfiniBand switching system that mirrors what users are seeing in the server and storage spaces: a lot of performance in a small form factor with the ability to pay for only what they use.
InfiniCons InfinIO 3000 Switching Series offers up to 32 10Gbps InfiniBand ports in a 1U (1.75-inch) rack that offers up to 640GB of throughput, said Charles Foley, CEO of the King of Prussia, Pa., company.
In addition, the system features InfiniCons Ports on Demand strategy. The base switch comes with 16 of its 32 ports activated, Foley said. As demand grows, users can activate new ports in increments of four by downloading a software key from InfiniCon, he said.
Though the Port on Demand program is only available with the 3000 series, Foley said the company is planning to extend it across its entire switching line in the future.
InfiniCon is aiming the switch at the high-performance computing and clustering spaces, where InfiniBand is getting the most traction. The InfinIO 3000 series is designed to tie together large number of commodity servers.
“The worlds moving more and more to scale-out” architecture, where multiple smaller systems are linked together to give users the processor power of larger SMP servers, Foley said.
The 3000, which will start shipping in September with a starting price of $27,995, will offer up to 45 percent faster switching latency, a key issue for HPC customers. According to InfiniCon, the switch, combined with the companys host software, offers 5.5 microseconds latency.
The 3000 also can be used either as a core switch—in which any port can communicate with any other port at full speed—or as a leaf switch, which sits at the edge of the fabric between the server nodes and infrastructures back-end.