Infiniband questions

809 Views 1 Reply 2 Participants Last post by yawnbox, Mar 14, 2009

mbreitba

Discussion Starter · Mar 4, 2009

So I'm not new to the datacenter world, but typically we've been a relatively small shop.

We're looking at doing some geographic load balancing and will need a SAN that will be able to handle the high I/O load of replicating data to a second location.

We're planning on SAS drives for our enclosure, but when I look at interfaces for our Bladecenter, the only option other than Ethernet is Infiniband.

My question is this - can I connect and control a SAS storage array with an Infiniband controller?

The SAS system that we're looking at is this one : http://www.acmemicro.com/estore/merc...id=6666&step=4

and the infiniband controller for our Blades is this :
http://supermicro.com/products/Super...OC-IBH-001.cfm

And the Infiniband switch that we would use is this :

http://www.acmemicro.com/estore/merc...id=4944&step=4

I'm new to infiniband and am not very familiar with it. I know they make adapters to convert from infiniband connectors to mini-SAS connectors, but what I really need to know is if the controller will actually talk to the SAS disk array.

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yawnbox

· #2 · Mar 14, 2009

this sounds really neat-- i don't have experience with Infiniband, but I do understand the concepts. I found this:

Quote:

InfiniBand adapters provide unified and scalable I/O connectivity on the server side, reducing cabling complexity and improving I/O utilization and cost. When scaling capacity on the SAN side, data center designers can choose either native InfiniBand-attached storage targets or modular InfiniBand-to-Fibre Channel bridges to connect to existing Fibre Channel SANs and back-end storage. In either case, the high levels of bandwidth and reliability are maintained for SAN-based applications running on the servers.

The amount of available end-to-end SAN bandwidth is dependent on back-end storage capacity on the SAN side. When modular bridges are used, remote Fibre Channel ports can be shared, SAN capacity can be designed and scaled based on average load across servers, and SAN and server capacity can be scaled independently.

http://www.comnews.com/stories/artic...infiniband.htm

i think it's important to note that Infiniband wouldn't actually talk to the SAS drives or the arrays directly, but through the actual SAN controller. so as long as you have Infiniband to fibre interconnects/ adaptability, you should be fine.

EDIT: also,

Quote:

HP offers complete InfiniBand solutions, including switches, host channel adapters (HCAs), cables and management software. All of HP's rackmount and blade server products support InfiniBand. The HP BladeSystem c-Class includes an integrated InfiniBand DDR switch; representing the only DDR-rated blade enclosure available today. HP has also integrated InfiniBand into the HP Unified Cluster Portfolio (UCP) of pre-engineered and pre-packaged industry standard cluster solutions. InfiniBand is the most popular interconnect in UCP, Koeninger notes, when messaging faster than 1GbE is required.

http://h20311.www2.hp.com/HPC/cache/...0-0-0-121.html

edit2: it seems that there are a number of options:
http://www.rorke.com/av/aurora.cfm
http://www.verari.com/documents/datasheets/VS7000i.pdf

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