I’m still pondering my take on Interop this year. It’s been a while since I’ve seen so many abandoned spaces on the show floor. Mind you most were 10×10 or 10×20 spots, but you could tell there were others who really went light on their presence. I saw one booth which had a 40×40 booth and just filled it with banner stands. Yikes! So nothing was really grabbing at me until I went to Fusion-io’s booth and saw the wall of monitors with a 1,000 videos playing on it at once. 
FINALLY SOMETHING IMPRESSIVE!
Even more amazing, the videos were all being driven by a single PCIe card which had 1.2TB of SSD RAM on it. This one “ioSAN” card from Fusion-io completely saturated 16 servers (126 cpu cores)…and they were able to achieve this through the bandwidth performance and ultra low-latency of 20Gb/s InfiniBand via Mellanox’s ConnectX adapters. In fact, they told me the 20Gb/s InfiniBand connection would allow them to saturate even more servers, yet they only brought 16.
The video below, featuring Fusion-io’s CTO David Flynn, tells the complete story:
The ioSAN can be used as networked, server-attached storage or integrated into networked storage infrastructure, making fundamental changes to the enterprise storage area. This is a great example of how Mellanox InfiniBand is the enabling technology for next generation storage.
Talk with you again soon,
Brian Sparks
brian@mellanox.com
