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Why Atlantic.Net Chose Mellanox

By on February 13, 2013

Atlantic.Net is a global cloud hosting provider that offers Atlantic.Net can now offer customers more robust cloud hosting services through a reliable, adaptable infrastructure, all at a lower cost in comparison to traditional interconnect solutions.

Why Atlantic.Net Chose Mellanox

  • Price and Cost Advantage

Expensive hardware, overhead costs while scaling, as well as administrative costs can be avoided with Mellanox’s interconnect technologies and thereby reduce costs 32% per application.

  • Lower Latency and Faster Storage Access:

By utilizing the iSCSI RDMA Protocol (iSER) implemented in KVM servers over a single converged InfiniBand interconnect adapter, iSER delivers lower latency and is less complex, resulting in lower costs to the user.

  • Consolidate I/O Transparently

LAN and SAN connectivity for VMs on KVM and Atlantic.Net’s management environment is tightly integrated; allowing Atlantic.Net to transparently consolidate LAN, SAN, live migrations and other traffic.

The Bottom Line

By deploying Mellanox’s InfiniBand solution, Atlantic.Net can support high volume and high-performance requirements– on-demand – and offer a service that scales as customers’ needs change and grow. Having built a high performance, reliable and redundant storage infrastructure using off-the-shelf commodity hardware, Atlantic.Net was able to avoid purchasing expensive Fibre Channel storage arrays, saving significant capital expenses per storage system.

 

http://youtu.be/frTWWwjacyc

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The Promise of an End-To-End SDN Solution, can it be done?

By on February 13, 2013

Written By: Eli Karpilovski, Manager, Cloud Market Development

 

The new open source cloud orchestration platform called OpenStack is the promise of flexible network virtualization, and network overlays are looking closer than ever. The vision of this platform is to enable the on-demand creation of many distinct networks on top of one underlying physical infrastructure in the cloud environment. The platform will support automated provisioning and management of large groups of virtual machines or compute resources, including extensive monitoring in the cloud.

 

There is still a lot of work to be done, as there are many concerns around the efficiency and simplicity of the management solution for the compute and storage resources. A mature solution will need to incorporate different approaches to interact within the intra-server provisioning, QoS and vNIC management. For example, by leaning on local network adapters that are capable of managing the requests utilizing OpenFlow protocol, or by using a more standard approach which is managed by the switch. Using only one method, might create performance and efficiency penalties.

 

Learn how Mellanox’s OpenStack solution offloads the orchestration platform from the management of individual networking elements, with the end-goal of simplifying operations of large-scale, complex infrastructures www.mellanox.com/openstack

 

Have Questions, Join our Cloud Community Today!

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Why I left HP after 19 years to join ProfitBricks

By on February 13, 2013

On 02.12.13, In Cloud Computing, by
Originally Posted: http://blog.profitbricks.com/why-i-left-hp

Pete Johnson, new Platform Evangelist

Woz once said, “I thought I’d be an HPer for life.” While I don’t usually claim to have a whole lot in common with the man who designed the first computer I ever saw (an Apple II, summer ’78), in this instance it’s true. As it turns out, we were both wrong.

Pete Johnson, new Platform Evangelist for ProfitBricks

I stayed at HP as long as I did for lots of reasons. Business model diversity is one:  over the last two decades, I was lucky enough to be a front line coder, a tech lead, a project manager, and an enterprise architect while working on web sites for enterprise support, consumer ecommerce sales, enterprise online sales, all forms of marketing, and even post-sales printing press supplies reordering.   Most recently I was employee #37 for HP’s new public cloud offering where I performed a lot of roles including project management of web development teams, customer facing demonstrations at trade shows, and sales pitches for Fortune 500 CIOs.  But I also remained at HP because of the culture and values that came straight from Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, which my early mentors instilled in me. You can still find those values there today if you look hard enough, and if anybody gets that, Meg Whitman does.

Why leave HP for ProfitBricks then?

So if I still have such a rosy view of HP, despite recent bumpiness, why did I leave to become the Platform Evangelist for ProfitBricks?

Three reasons:

  1. InfiniBand
  2. InfiniBand
  3. InfiniBand

If you are anything like the sample of computer industry veterans I told about my move last week, you just said, “What the heck is InfiniBand?” Let me explain what it is and why it is poised to fundamentally change the cloud computing.

Ethernet is the dominant network technology used in data centers today. Originally created during the Carter administration, it uses a hierarchical structure of LAN segments, which ultimately means that packets have exactly one path to traverse when moving from point A to point B anywhere in the network. InfiniBand, which is a popular 21st century technology in the supercomputing and high-performance computing (HPC) communities, uses a grid or mesh system that gives packets multiple paths from point A to point B. This key difference, among other nuances, gives InfiniBand a top speed of 80 Gbits/sec, resulting in a speed that is 80x faster than Amazon’s AWS 1Gbit/sec standard Ethernet connections.

What’s the big deal about InfiniBand?

“So what?” you may be thinking. “A faster cloud network is nice, but it doesn’t seem like THAT big a deal.”

Actually, it is a VERY big deal when you stop and think about how a cloud computing provider can take advantage of a network like this.

As founder and CMO Andreas Gauger put it to me during the interview process, virtualization is a game of Tetris in which you are trying to fit various sizes of Virtual Machines on top of physical hardware to maximize utilization. This is particularly critical for a public cloud provider. With InfiniBand, Profit Bricks can rearrange the pieces, and at 80 Gbits/sec, our hyper-visor can move a VM from one physical machine to another without the VM ever knowing. This helps us maximize the physical hardware and keep prices competitive, but it also means two other things for our customers:

  • You can provision any combination of CPU cores and RAM you want, up to and including the size of the full physical hardware we use
  • You can change the number of CPU cores or amount of RAM on-the-fly, live, without rebooting the VM

In a world where other public cloud providers force you into cookie cutter VM sizes in an attempt to simplify the game of Tetris for themselves, the first feature is obviously differentiating. But when most people hear the second one, their reaction is that it can’t possibly be true — it must be a lie. You can’t change virtual hardware on a VM without rebooting it, can you?

No way you can change CPU or RAM without rebooting a VM!

Do you suppose I’d check that out before leaving the only employer I’ve ever known in my adult life?

I spun up a VM, installed Apache, launched a load test from my desktop against the web server I just created, changed both the CPU Cores and RAM on the server instance, confirmed the change at the VM command line, and allowed the load test to end.  You know what the load test log showed?

Number of errors: 0.

The Apache web server never went down, despite the virtual hardware change, and handled HTTP requests every 40 milliseconds. I never even lost my remote login session. Whoa.

But wait, there’s more (and more to come)

Throw in the fact that the ProfitBricks block storage platform takes advantage of InfiBand to not only provide RAID 10 redundancy, but RAID 10 mirrored across two availability zones, and I was completely sold.  I realized that ProfitBricks founder, CTO, and CEO Achim Weiss took the data center efficiency knowledge that gave 1&1 a tremendous price advantage and combined it with supercomputing technology to create a cloud computing game-changer that his engineering team is just beginning to tap into. I can’t wait to see what they do with object storage, databases, and everything else that you’d expect from a fully IaaS offering. I had to be a part of that.

Simply put: ProfitBricks uses InfiniBand to enable Cloud Computing 2.0.

And that’s why, after 19 years, I left HP.

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Product Flash – Bridgeworks Potomac 40Gb iSCSI-to-SAS Bridge

By on February 8, 2013

Written By: Erin Filliater, Enterprise Market Development Manager

 

The amount of worldwide digital information is growing on a daily basis, and all of that data has to be stored somewhere, usually in external storage infrastructures, systems and devices.  Of course, in order for that information to be useful, you need to have fast access to it when your application calls for it.  Enter Bridgeworks’ newest bridging product, the Potomac ESAS402800 40Gb iSCSI-to-SAS protocol bridge.  The first to take advantage of 40Gb/s data center infrastructures, the ESAS402800 integrates Mellanox 40Gb iSCSI technology to provide the fastest iSCSI SAN connectivity to external SAS devices such as disk arrays, LTO6 tape drives and tape libraries, allowing data center administrators to integrate the newest storage technologies into their environments without disrupting their legacy systems.

In addition to flat-out speed, plug n’ play connectivity and web-based GUI management make the ESAS402800 easy to install and operate.   Adaptive read- and write-forward caching techniques allow the ESAS402800 bridge to share storage effectively in today’s highly virtualized environments.

 

All of this adds up to easier infrastructure upgrades, more effective storage system migration and realization of the full performance potential of new SAS-connected storage systems. Pretty impressive for a single device.

 

Find out more about the recent Potomac ESAS402800 40Gb iSCSI-to-SAS bridge launch at Bridgeworks’ website:

http://www.4bridgeworks.com/news_and_press_releases/press_releases.phtml?id=252&item=26

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RDMA – Cloud providers “secret sauce”

By on February 6, 2013

Written By: Eli Karpilovski, Manager, Cloud Market Development

 

With expansive growth expected in the cloud-computing market, some researches expects the market will grow from $70.1 billion in 2012 to $158.8 billion in 2014 – cloud service providers must find ways to provide increasingly sustainable performance. At the same time, they must accommodate an increasing number of internet users, whose expectations about improved and consistent response times are growing.

 

However, service providers cannot increase performance if the corresponding cost also rises. What these providers need is a way to deliver low latency, fast response, and increasing performance while minimizing the cost of the network.

 

One good example to accomplish that is RDMA, Traditionally centralized storage was either slow or created bottlenecks and deemphasized the need for fast storage networks. With the advent of fast solid state devices, we are seeing a need for a VERY fast and converged network, to leverage the capabilities that is been offered, in particular, we are starting to see cloud arch using RDMA based storage appliances to accelerate access storage time, reduce latency and achieve the best CPU utilization on the end point.

 

To learn more about the usage of RDMA in providing cloud infrastructure requirements for meeting performance, availability and agility needs, now and in the future check the following link.

 

Mellanox- InfiniBand makes headway in the cloud – YouTube

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RDMA Interconnects for Storage: Fast, Efficient Data Delivery

By on January 28, 2013

Written By: Erin Filliater, Enterprise Market Development Manager

We all know that we live in a world of data, data and more data. In fact, IDC predicts that in 2015, the amount of data created and replicated will reach nearly 8 Zettabytes. With all of this data stored in external storage systems, the way data is transferred from storage to a server or application becomes critical to effectively utilizing that information. Couple this with today’s shrinking IT budgets and “do more with less” mindsets, and you have a real challenge on your hands. So, what’s a data center storage administrator to do?

Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) based interconnects offer an ideal option for boosting data center efficiency, reducing overall complexity and increasing data delivery performance. Available over InfiniBand and Ethernet, with RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), RDMA allows data to be transferred from storage to server without passing the data through the CPU and main memory path of TCP/IP Ethernet. Greater CPU and overall system efficiencies are attained because the storage and servers’ compute power is used for just that—computing—instead of processing network traffic. Bandwidth and latency are also of interest: both InfiniBand and RoCE feature microsecond transfer latencies, and bandwidths up to 56Gb/s. Plus, both can be effectively used for data center interconnect consolidation. This translates to screamingly fast application performance, better storage and data center utilization and simplified network management.

On a performance basis, RDMA based interconnects are actually more economical than other alternatives, both in initial cost and in operational expenses. Additionally, because RDMA interconnects are available with such high bandwidths, fewer cards and switch ports are needed to achieve the same storage throughput. This enables savings in server PCIe slots and data center floor space, as well as overall power consumption. It’s an actual solution for the “do more with less” mantra.

So, the next time your application performance isn’t making the grade, rather than simply adding more CPUs, storage and resources, maybe it’s time to consider a more efficient data transfer path.

Find out more: http://www.mellanox.com/page/storage

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Mellanox Named HP’s 2012 Innovation Supplier of the Year

By on January 14, 2013

We’re thrilled to start out 2013 with some great news: Mellanox was named HP’s 2012 Innovation Supplier of the Year at last month’s annual HP Supplier Summit in San Francisco.

Mellanox was chosen as the top supplier out of 600 worldwide contractors across all HP product lines. To determine the winner of the Innovation Supplier of the Year Award, HP evaluated an elite group of suppliers with outstanding performance exemplifying principles of delivering greater value, including enhanced revenue, cost savings and process efficiencies.

Earlier this year, Mellanox announced that its Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnect solutions are now available through HP to deliver leading application performance for the HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) servers. Specific products available include: Mellanox ConnectX®-3 PCIe 3.0 FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand adapters and 10/40GbE NICs, and SwitchX® FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand switch blades and systems. Mellanox offers the only interconnect option for the HP ProLiant Gen8 servers that includes PCIe 3.0-compliant adapters.

We look forward to the continued partnership with HP in 2013. And stay tuned to our blog to learn more about new and innovative partnerships between Mellanox and its customers throughout the year.

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Mellanox InfiniBand and Ethernet RDMA Interconnect Solutions Accelerate IBM’s Virtualized Database Solutions

By on October 19, 2012

Recently, IBM expanded its PureSystems family with the new PureData System, which features analytics and the ability to handle big data in the box. For today’s organizations to be competitive, they need to quickly and easily analyze and explore big data—even when dealing with petabytes. The new system simplifies and optimizes the performance of data warehouse services and analytics applications. The new PureData for Analytics system is designed to accelerate analytics and boasts the largest library of in-database analytic functions on the market today. Clients can use it to predict and help avoid customer churn in seconds, and create targeted advertising and promotions using predictive and spatial analysis, and prevent fraud.

We are pleased to announce that our InfiniBand and Ethernet RoCE interconnect solutions have been selected to accelerate these systems, helping reduce CPU overhead, enable higher system efficiency and availability, and deliver higher return-on-investment.

Modern database applications are placing increased demands on the server and storage interconnects as they require higher performance, scalability and availability. Virtualizing IBM DB2 pureScale® on System x® servers using Mellanox’s RDMA based interconnect solutions deliver outstanding application performance and business benefits to IBM customers.

Mellanox’s interconnect solutions on IBM DB2 pureScale virtualized database on System x servers provide the ability to run multiple highly scalable databases clusters on the same shared infrastructure, while staying highly available and helping to minimize downtimes.

Mellanox interconnect products enable the IBM DB2 pureScale to deliver the performance and functionality needed to support the most demanding database and transaction processing applications. Using Mellanox high bandwidth, low latency interconnects is one of the key ingredients in building scalable cluster solutions with DB2 pureScale.

Mellanox InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnects enable IBM DB2 pureScale to provide a direct connectivity from the database virtual machines to the interconnect infrastructure while preserving RDMA semantics. This direct connectivity allows virtual machines to achieve lower latency and faster data access versus other solutions.

Live Demonstration and presentations at Information On demand 2012 (October 21st – October 26th at Las Vegas, NV)

Visit the Intel booth on the Expo floor to see a live demonstration of virtualized DB2 pureScale cluster running over Mellanox’s 10GbE with RoCE interconnect solution.

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Mellanox InfiniBand and Ethernet Switches Receive IPv6 Certification

By on October 2, 2012

I am proud to announce that Mellanox’s SwitchX® line of InfiniBand and Ethernet switches have received a gold certification for Internet Protocol v6 (IPv6) by the Internet Protocol Forum.  Adding IPv6 support to our SwitchX series is another milestone for Mellanox’s InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions, and demonstrates our commitment to producing quality, interoperable InfiniBand and Ethernet products optimized for the latest Internet Protocols.

SX1036 - 36-port 40GbE Switch

Mellanox’s drive to satisfy strong requirements has led to receiving the gold certification as part of the IPv6 Ready Logo Program which is a conformance and interoperability testing program designed to increase user confidence by demonstrating that IPv6 is the future of network architecture.

We at Mellanox feel that as global technology adoption rates increase, there is a greater need for larger networks and subsequently more IP addresses. Just as background, Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), still in dominant use, is now reaching the limit of its capacity. The next generation of IP – IPv6 – is designed to provide a vastly expanded address space and quadruples the number of network address bits from 32 bits in IPv4 to 128 bits, providing more than enough globally unique IP addresses for every networked device on the planet.

Regards,

Amit Katz

Director, Product Management

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Mellanox FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand Adapters Provide Leading Application Performance for Dell PowerEdge C8000 Series Servers

By on September 19, 2012

Dell just announced today the PowerEdge C8000 series, which is the industry’s only 4U shared infrastructure solution to provide customers compute, GPU/coprocessor and storage options in a single chassis. End users deploying the PowerEdge C8000 with Mellanox fast interconnect solutions gain access to the industry-leading performance of 56Gb/s InfiniBand combined with the power of Dell’s newest high end server, resulting in a high performance solution with low total cost of ownership in power efficiency, system scaling efficiency and compute density.

Mellanox FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand solutions are already being deployed with Dell PowerEdge C8000 systems as part of the Stampede supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin. With a peak performance of more than 10 petaflops, Stampede will be the most powerful system available to researchers via the NSF’s eXtreme Science & Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program when installed in January 2013.

Mellanox fast interconnect solutions are providing the Dell PowerEdge C8000 with low latency, high bandwidth benefits for the most resource-intensive hyperscale workloads, including HPC, big data processing and hosting providers. Mellanox delivers the most effective interconnect solution for the Dell PowerEdge C8000, enabling the highest compute and storage performance at the lowest cost and power consumption.

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