Fabric Consolidation with Infiniband

In the era of exploding datacenter requirements for networking and storage services, and with the increasing power, space, and budget concerns over the infrastructure, fabric consolidation becomes inevitable. InfiniBand was designed from day one for fabric consolidation. With 120Gb/s links and with ultra low-latency characteristics, InfiniBand provides a well provisioned foundation for consolidation of networking and storage. Additional features such as QoS, partitioning, virtual lanes, lossless fabric, and congestion management facilitate true consolidation of fabrics along with connectivity of InfiniBand islands to Ethernet and Fibre Channel clouds through gateways. This session highlights the features for fabric consolidation and the various protocols that run over InfiniBand with emphasis on storage protocols.

Learning Objectives

Understand the InfiniBand architecture and feature set
Understand the benefits of InfiniBand for fabric consolidation
Understand the standard InfiniBand storage protocols