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InfiniCon Systems is looking to bracket the InfiniBand switch market.
At the International Supercomputer Conference this week in Heidelberg, Germany, InfiniCon Systems Inc. is rolling out two additions to its high-end InfinIO family of InfiniBand switches that will increase the number of available ports to 288. The largest number of 4X (10Gbps) ports currently available is 32 in the InfinIO 9024, according to InfiniCon CEO Charles Foley.
At the same time, the King of Prussia, Pa., company also is announcing an entry-level switch, the InfinIO 5000, a 12-port offering that will feature access to Fibre Channel storage and Ethernet network resources, Foley said.
“In a sense, were addressing the crying need for much higher density and throughput,” he said.
Customers in the high-performance computing arena—where InfiniBand, a high-bandwidth, low-latency fabric, is gaining the widest traction—are demanding products that offer greater numbers of nodes and can connect to existing Fibre Channel-based storage and Ethernet network systems. They also want the ability to add large numbers of users to each node, Foley said.
The InfinIO 9100 can deploy 144 ports in a 7U (12.25-inch) form factor, while the 9200 can offer up to 288 ports in a 14U (24.5-inch) package. In a fully configured model, the 9200 can run up to 5.76 terabytes per second of throughput, he said.
Foley said InfiniBand will continue to gain traction as cluster and grid computing become increasingly popular. The 9000 series systems come with such high-availability features as redundant power and management, and hot-swap components.
The InfinIO 5000, which will start at $9,995, is aimed at commercial, high-performance computing environments and distributed database offerings such as Oracle Corp.s 10g software.
All three new InfiniBand switches will be available in the third quarter, Foley said.
