InfiniBand(SM) Trade Association Ratifies iSER (iSCSI RDMA) Storage Protocol for InfiniBand; The iSER Specification Enhances InfiniBand's Capabilities to Address Storage in the Enterprise.SAN FRANCISCO San Francisco (săn frănsĭs`kō), city (1990 pop. 723,959), coextensive with San Francisco co., W Calif., on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, which are connected by the strait known as the Golden -- The InfiniBand Trade Association The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) is the standards organization that defines and maintains the InfiniBand specification. It is an industry consortium. The IBTA was established in 1999, and its most prominent members include Cisco, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, QLogic, Sun and today announced that it has released a new annex to the specification providing support for iSER over InfiniBand. The iSER annex extends InfiniBand's support for high performance storage. At 10-20 Gbps bitrates, InfiniBand's performance is now more than triple that of FibreChannel, and at only half the cost. Subsequently, InfiniBand has six times the price performance advantage of FibreChannel. iSER is a new IETF See Internet Engineering Task Force. IETF - Internet Engineering Task Force standard extension to iSCSI that includes support for RDMA-enabled networks such as InfiniBand; the new annex closes the loop by mapping the iSER extensions onto InfiniBand. The combination of iSER and InfiniBand's unsurpassed performance brings significantly greater performance to iSCSI while leveraging iSCSI's existing comprehensive management capabilities. This allows heterogeneous storage environments to utilize a single protocol and management infrastructure while taking advantage of InfiniBand's performance and channel characteristics. "Solutions using iSER can leverage iSCSI's rich management capabilities and InfiniBand's high performance," said Arun Taneja, analyst from Taneja Group. "Now iSCSI is capable of supporting the demanding storage and uptime requirements of enterprise data centers." iSER combined with InfiniBand, the only RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) A communications protocol that provides transmission of data from the memory of one computer to the memory of another without involving the CPU. InfiniBand, Virtual Interface (VI) and RDMA Over IP are all forms of RDMA. standard available today, provides the ideal solution for enterprise and technical computing grids that require high performance clustering and storage. As iSER is standards-based and no changes need to be made to use the technology, a user can protect his technology investment. "iSER is based on iSCSI I/O (Input/Output) The transfer of data between the CPU and a peripheral device. Every transfer is an output from one device and an input to another. See PC input/output. I/O - Input/Output and management protocols/processes and provides these rich features with a traditional iSCSI look and feel," said John Hufferd, senior executive director of technology at Brocade Communications Systems Brocade, Inc. NASDAQ: BRCD, based in Silicon Valley, designs, manufactures, and sells storage networking solutions and management applications for storage area networks (SANs) and file area networks (FANs). , Inc. and co-author of the iSER extension to iSCSI. "This means we have a set of SCSI SCSI in full Small Computer System Interface Once common standard for connecting peripheral devices (disks, modems, printers, etc.) to small and medium-sized computers. SCSI has given way to faster standards, such as Firewire and USB. I/O and management protocols that will operate on normal TCP/IP TCP/IP in full Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol Standard Internet communications protocols that allow digital computers to communicate over long distances. networks, iWarp (RDMA TCP/IP) networks and now on InfiniBand networks. iSER makes iSCSI available and operationally ready for the enterprise." iSER has a comprehensive set of storage networking capabilities enabling features such as: plug and play deployment, name services, automated discovery, security, automated error and failure recovery, change modifications, load balancing and standard management interfacing. iSER is in production quality as part of the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) and is available in leading Linux distributions from Red Hat and Novell/SuSE. iSER is also part of the recently-released kernel 2.6.18. FalconStor Software(R), LSI LSI: see integrated circuit. (Large Scale Integration) Between 3,000 and 100,000 transistors on a chip. See SSI, MSI, VLSI and ULSI. Logic, SGI (SGI, Sunnyvale, CA, www.sgi.com) A manufacturer of workstations and servers, founded in 1982 by Jim Clark. The company was founded as Silicon Graphics, Inc., but changed to its acronym in 1999. and Voltaire are currently working on iSER-based InfiniBand storage products. Many other solutions are planned for release within the next year. About the InfiniBand Trade Association The Internet is creating an increased demand for server computer I/O subsystem performance, scalability, reliability and flexibility. A shift to a switched fabric-based I/O architecture will enable industry participants to meet this increased demand. The InfiniBand Trade Association developed a specification for a channel-based, switched fabric architecture that provides a scalable performance range of 2.5Gbps to 120Gbps, meeting current and future needs from entry level to high-end enterprise systems. InfiniBand I/O is the only open standard available today with remote direct memory access (RDMA). The InfiniBand Trade Association represents the industry's choice for developing I/O technologies that will keep pace with the demands of the Internet age. InfiniBand(TM/SM) is a trademark and service mark of the InfiniBand Trade Association. Other names and brands are the property of their respective owners. |
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