OpenFabrics Alliance Showcases First-Ever Unified InfiniBand and iWARP Ethernet Software Solution in Oracle and Fluent/Intel MPI Application Environments. Check it out:
SAN FRANCISCO --(Business Wire)-- The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) today announced that it is hosting two demonstrations at the Intel Developer Forum that showcase InfiniBand and iWARP (RDMA over Ethernet) running concurrently in clusters over the OpenFabrics stacks. One demonstration features Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC) and the other features Fluent running over Intel MPI. Both demonstrations are running concurrently over InfiniBand and iWARP. The Intel Developer Forum runs September 26-28 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. The OpenFabrics demonstrations are located in booths 728 and 732.
The Oracle Database 10g demonstration shows the capability to failover seamlessly between InfiniBand and iWARP devices despite the fact that the underlying transport technologies are different. The OFA software stack abstracts the transport details from Oracle and other applications built on top of this stack, accelerating the development and time to market of RDMA-enabled solutions.
"The unification of InfiniBand and iWARP software solutions unlocks the power and promise of these technologies," said Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst, StorageIO Group. "The combination of InfiniBand and iWARP makes both transport technologies stronger and should lead to broader market adoption by providing a foundation for RDMA-enabled applications in an open environment. This demonstration by the OpenFabrics Alliance is a great step forward in the evolution of these technologies into solutions that are ready to address real-world IT issues."
The charter of OFA has been expanded from its InfiniBand roots to be transport independent, which means formal support for iWARP in the OFA software stack. While the iWARP R-NICs are relatively new to the market, OFA has iWARP providers as members, resulting in the first-ever proofs of concept of InfiniBand and iWARP devices interoperating on the same Intel server cluster. The two demonstrations on display at the Intel Developer Forum include the common elements of the OFA software stack, the latest Intel dual-core servers and PCI Express adapters.
The first demonstration showcases Oracle 10g RAC running over SilverStorm Technologies InfiniBand Host Channel Adapters and switches, Chelsio R-NICs and a Fujitsu 10Gb Ethernet switch and NFS over RDMA storage. The second demonstration showcases Fluent and Intel MPI with Cisco IBA and 10Gb Ethernet switches, NetEffect Ethernet Channel Adapters and QLogic IBA Host Channel Adapters.
This advancement in the OFA stack for InfiniBand and iWARP will deliver an innovation platform for the industry for high-speed interconnects and applications. It is expected to provide validation efficiencies and design choice based on specific customer requirements for system integrators with cost reductions for end users irrespective of their interconnect requirements.
"The demonstrations at the Intel Developer Forum this week represent achievement of significant milestones by the OpenFabrics Alliance," said Jim Ryan, chair, OpenFabrics Alliance and manager of Intel Industry Initiatives. "Through close cooperation with many companies, we are executing on the vision of the OpenFabrics Alliance and demonstrating the capabilities of a single, interoperable software stack that supports InfiniBand and iWARP Ethernet transports."
About OpenFabrics Alliance
The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) develops and licenses open source software for RDMA transport-agnostic fabrics. The organization was founded in June 2004 as the OpenIB Alliance with two goals: to develop a Linux-based InfiniBand software stack for acceptance into the kernel, and for the Linux distributors to include and support this stack. In 2005, with encouragement from Microsoft, the Alliance expanded to develop and support a Windows stack. In 2006, with the decision to integrate iWARP (also known as RDMA over Ethernet) into the same software stack, the Alliance has become fabric, or transport, agnostic. This transport agnosticism allows other RDMA interconnects to leverage the OFA software. The OFA is comprised of technology vendors and end-user organizations including: AMD, Appro, Chelsio, Cisco, Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique CEA, DataDirect Networks, Dell, IBM, Intel, Linux Networx, LSI Logic, Mellanox Technologies, Neterion, Inc., Network Appliance, NetEffect, Oracle, PANTA Systems, QLogic Corporation, Rackable Systems, Silicon Graphics, Inc., SilverStorm Technologies, System Fabric Works, Sun Microsystems, Tyan Computer Corp., Symantec, Voltaire, Xsigo Systems and the following research members: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. Participating OFA Member Endorsements
"Chelsio is pleased to participate in this demonstration with a unified wire solution," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, CEO of Chelsio Communications. "It is very rewarding to see this level of cooperation amongst the many participants in the industry as we work toward OFA's vision of a transport-neutral API. The capability of running RDMA applications over Ethernet provides a new level of flexibility and economic gains for customers by enabling fabric independence as well as fabric convergence."
"The OpenFabrics demonstrations showcase new capabilities over InfiniBand and Ethernet fabrics that provide greater flexibility and agility for high-performance applications," said Bill Erdman, director of product marketing, Server Virtualization Business Unit at Cisco Systems. "With new features and protocol interoperability, we are seeing an increase in the rate of adoption of InfiniBand in the enterprise as well as high-performance computing environments."
"As one of the founding members of the OpenFabrics Alliance and the first to represent Ethernet, NetEffect is pleased to participate in this demonstration," said John Hagerman, vice president of marketing and business development for NetEffect. "These demonstrations signify the tremendous progress OFA has made in integrating InfiniBand and iWARP Ethernet into a single software stack. As a result, end users will now have the flexibility to adopt either or both technologies for their data center fabrics without changing their RDMA-enabled applications."
"Oracle is pleased to participate in the OpenFabrics demonstration, and showcase the use of 10Gb InfiniBand and Ethernet for high-performance database applications," said Juan Loaiza, senior vice president of systems technology for Oracle. "Both InfiniBand and iWARP have the potential to become a unified fabric for storage, cluster communication and networking."
"SilverStorm is pleased to continue its strong commitment to Oracle RAC clustering with InfiniBand by partnering with Intel, Oracle and the OpenFabrics community to enable the RAC OpenFabrics interoperability demo at IDF," said Russ Hawkins, CEO of SilverStorm. "SilverStorm looks forward to adding the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution software to its scalable, multi-protocol InfiniBand solution set for Oracle RAC."
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