IBM and Topspin Team Up for IBM BladeCenter Solution

HostReview.com
Tuesday, November 9, 2004; 03:05 PM

IBM (www.ibm.com) and Topspin Communications (www.topspin.com), a provider in high-performance grid and utility computing, today announced a jointly developed InfiniBand I/O solution for the leading blade, IBM eServer BladeCenter.

"Adding InfiniBand's open interconnectivity to BladeCenter will further accelerate the incredible success BladeCenter now enjoys in the high-performance computing environment and commercial marketplaces," said Jeff Benck, vice president, IBM eServer BladeCenter.

The Topspin solution for BladeCenter will offer 80-gigabit connectivity to the chassis, remote direct memory access (RDMA), and an ability to consolidate clustering, LAN, and SAN traffic from the chassis over a single I/O fabric, increasing throughput and reducing costs.

InfiniBand, a standard-server interconnect and I/O technology, creates a unified high-performance fabric to share I/O interconnects among many servers, enabling clustered servers to access shared resources.

Increasingly, clients are creating high-performance environments by clustering BladeCenter systems, as seen in the Supercomputing Top500 list released at this conference.

Similarly, in the first five quarters of shipping its InfiniBand-based server switching products to HPC and enterprise customers, Topspin has seen its volumes ramp to over 10,000 switch ports a quarter, demonstrating the rapid adoption of its technology.

The new BladeCenter options include the Topspin IB Switch Module and a Topspin IB HCA Expansion Card. With Topspin's external server switch portfolio and innovative VFrame(TM) server virtualization software suite, the integrated solution provides virtualization of the BladeCenter's I/O, and the ability to provision application and operating system images to server blades on demand.