Obsidian, ADVA Team on InfiniBand

AUSTIN, Texas -- Obsidian Strategics, the leader in InfiniBand range extension through its Longbow™ family of products, and ADVA Optical Networking, a leading provider of Optical+Ethernet solutions for data, storage, voice and video services, today announced a partnership that would bring the first-ever 100G/bits DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) InfiniBand link to the market. The joint solution combines new Obsidian Longbow C Series™ and high-capacity ADVA Optical Networking optical transport technologies, uniquely enabling a powerful new class of storage-area network, cluster-clustering, remote visualization and data center-expansion applications. The technology will be demonstrated at the 2008 SuperComputing conference in Austin, Tx., booth # 1344.

InfiniBand is primarily used as a fast and scalable fabric interconnect for linking compute and storage nodes within a high-performance data center. The protocol is usually limited to very short-reach cables unsuitable for applications between buildings. The Obsidian-ADVA Optical Networking technology combination offers this same performance over tens of kilometers – scaling to up to 80 4X SDR InfiniBand links through a single dedicated fiber pair.

"Many-core processors, high-capacity disks and solid-state storage technologies are resulting in exponentially growing volumes of data being accessed ever more rapidly,” says Dr. David Southwell, president of Obsidian Strategics. “However, these data sets are increasingly trapped by the walls of their data centers – traditional long-haul networking is not keeping up and the time required to routinely move Petabytes of data is often prohibitive. Longbow technology allows the use of InfiniBand as an alternative to TCP/IP, leveraging faster InfiniBand hardware and bypassing the latency and bandwidth efficiency problems that plague lossy transport protocols over high bandwidth-delay product links. Striping parallel InfiniBand links over ADVA Optical Networking’s DWDM equipment provides the means to scale network capacity alongside compute and storage.”

ADVA Optical Networking