Voltaire raises stakes in Infiniband vs. Ethernet showdown

While most Ethernet backbones use 10-Gigabit Ethernet, some large organizations and carriers are eyeing 100-Gigabit Ethernet backbone gear, which the new InfiniBand standard, dubbed FDR (Fourteen Data Rate) InfiniBand, should provide the basis for at 168 Gbps switch-to-switch throughput. So says Voltaire's vice president of marketing Asaf Somekh in an article by IDG News's Joab Jackson at PC World.

Voltaire plans to offer switches that use FDR in the second half of 2011. In June, the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) updated the InfiniBand Roadmap, introducing FDR as a higher-throughput replacement for its current standard, QDR (Quad Data Rate). QDR can provide 40G bps (bits per second) throughput to a server, or 32Gb/s of actual payload. FDR can provide 56Gb/s of payload, Somekh said.

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The report continues:

Somekh would not reveal what the total throughput will be, though IBTA asserts that FDR's new rate of encoding can deliver 64 bits of information using only 2 bits of overhead, which is superior to the QDR encoding that delivers 8 bits using 2 bits of overhead. This suggests that total throughput, including overhead, might be around 57.75 Gb/s.

Somekh did not give any details on Voltaire's plans for FDR server adapters, but he did say the company plans to introduce a set of switches that would have three 56 Gb/s channels, for an aggregate throughput of 168 Gb/s, in the second half of next year.

The IBTA has positioned FDR as a cost-effective InfiniBand for midsized data centers. In addition to FDR, the association also introduced EDR (Enhanced Data Rate), which will have approximately twice the throughput of FDR and is expected to become available next year. Voltaire did not say whether it plans to support EDR.

Both standards are the latest salvos in the ongoing competition between InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet as the choice for low-latency, high-throughput communications. Last June, the IEEE approved the 802.3ba standard for 40-Gigabit and 100-Gigabit Ethernet, and vendors are now producing gear to meet these specs.

We'll continue to follow this story closely here at Interconnection World.

LINK:

Voltaire Ups Ante in InfiniBand Ethernet Duel (PC World)