I/O virtualization is a complimentary solution for server and storage virtualization, which aims to reduce the management complexity of physical connections in and out of virtual hosts. Virtualized data center clusters will have multiple networking connections to LAN and SAN, and virtualizing the network avoids the extra complexity associated with it. While I/O virtualization reduces [...]
Last week I was at Storage Networking World in Orlando, Florida. The sessions were a lot better organized with focus on all the popular topics like Cloud Computing, Storage Virtualization and Solid State Storage (SSD). In our booth, we demonstrated our Layer 2 agnostic storage supporting iSCSI, FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) and SRP (SCSI RDMA [...]
The industry has been talking about it for a long time, but on March 30th, it was officially announced. The new Xeon 5500 “Nehalem” platform from Intel has introduced a totally new concept of server architecture for Intel-based platforms. The memory has moved from being connected to the chipset to be connected directly to the CPU, [...]
Change happens, and when you talk to anyone involved in the enterprise data center, change has been accelerating and is making their life more and more complicated. The most recent issue is the growing list of network protocols which the network engineer has to choose from. Previously, the decision on what network protocol was [...]
BridgeX received an excellent response from all the analysts that we briefed over the last few weeks. One article talked about how BridgeX reminded the author of the early days of networking when networking companies delivered bridges for Ethernet, Token Ring and Banyan Vines. The other one talked about the mish-mosh of protocols in the data [...]
Yesterday, myself along with Motti Beck and Ali Ayoub (our main VMware software developer at Mellanox) diligently put together a very compelling demo that highlights the convergence capabilities of our BridgeX BX 4000 gateway that we announced last week. We unpacked everything and got it all up and running in less than an hour (this [...]
Today, we announced one of the most innovative and strategic product – BridgeX, an I/O agnostic fabric consolidation silicon and you drop that in a 1U enclosure it becomes a full fledged system (BX4000) Few years back we defined our product strategy to deliver a single-wire I/O consolidation to data centers. The approach was not [...]
As promised in my last blog post (over two weeks ago), this post will focus on results from a more financial market-related application. The results below come from testing performed with 29West LBM 3.3.9. 29West LBM offers topic-based Publish/Subscribe semantics without a central server. Its primary design goal is to minimize latency. Many end-users and middleware providers incorporate LBM [...]
Last week, Mellanox released the latest Microsoft WHQL certified Mellanox WinOF 2.0 (Windows OpenFabrics) drivers. This provides superior performance for low-latency, high-throughput clusters running on Microsoft Windows® HPC Server 2008. You may be asking yourself, how does this address my cluster computing needs? Does the Windows OFED stack released by Mellanox provide the same performance [...]
As previously suggested, I will review in this post a different application that is focused on converting protocols. QuickTransit, developed by a company called Transitive (recently acquired by IBM), is a cross-platform virtualization technology which allows applications that have been compiled for one operating system and processor to run on servers that use a different [...]
