Mellanox Builds Bridges for Data Center Connectivity

Mellanox Technologies at VMworld Europe this week is demonstrating a new line of bridges that are designed to converge and unify I/O within data centers. The BridgeX line will link InfiniBand to Ethernet and Fibre Channel and Ethernet to Fibre Channel.

"This lets you use wiring protocol and connect legacy systems to LANs to SANs," says Gilad Shainer, the company's director of technical marketing. "Data centers can be designed to be efficient without any unutilized resources with a family of boxes that are easy to manage and support."

Mellanox says it is providing enterprises with the flexibility that is not available with other approaches to building a unified fabric in the data center, which Shainer says force IT managers to use a specific protocol or transport for I/O consolidation. "The right way is to use one physical wire but have the ability to run any protocol over that wire. That's how you get a very efficient and green data center," he says.

The company has built a single silicon device that can provide all of the conversions and plans to sell a family of boxes under the Mellanox name. That will help to eliminate the use of network adapters and software-based protocol conversions, which can slow performance, he says. The BridgeX approach is to encapsulate traffic, which Shainer says makes it simple to manage, uses less power, and lets the network perform at wire speeds.

"You can drop it into your data center and get rid of unnecessary networks," he argues. Enterprises that are running InfiniBand for a high-performance computing network and Fibre Channel for storage can added a BridgeX to the InfiniBand network and get rid of the Fibre Channel hardware. Others that are using Ethernet and Fibre Channel can add a BridgeX and get rid of Fibre Channel. This approach lets companies deploy converged 40 Gbit/s InfiniBand networks, he says.The product line has been in development for more than a year. General availability is planned for next month and the cost should be around $10,000, Shainer says.

"We want to leave it to the user to make the decision of which transport they want to use. Our virtual protocol interconnect lets them run any transport on top of any wire, and it will let them run Ethernet, Fibre Channel, or InfiniBand apps on to of it," he says. "We see this as providing future growth as well as a return on yesterday's investment. You don't need to throw out what you have, you now can connect them in more efficient ways."

The new line of bridges provides companies with a "a great way to start experimenting with the concept of a unified fabric without having to buy a whole bunch of expensive equipment," says Yankee Group SVP for Enterprise Research Zeus Kerravala. But the bad economy may harm's Mellanox's prospects for sales. "A lot of companies are just maintaining the status quo," he says.

Kerravala said the move by Mellanox reminds him of the early days of networking when companies used bridges to link Token Ring networks to Ethernet networks to Banyon Vines networks, before all data networks moved to Ethernet. "This lets you get started without having to fork lift anything," he says.

In the long run, Ethernet probably will win out in the battle to provide a converged fabric in the data center, he argues. "Ethernet has improved a lot over the last few years and it is finally at a point where it is comparable with Fibre Channel," Kerravala says. "The whole concept of a converged fabric over Ethernet is a solid one."0