Intelligently Connect InfiniBand Fabrics to Ethernet Networks to Maximize Total Solution Performance of Compute and Storage Grids

Overview

Voltaire Ethernet Gateways are high performance I/O virtualization gateways that easily integrate with Voltaire Grid Director™ switches. Voltaire Ethernet gateways enable users to consolidate their server, network and storage connectivity into one extremely scalable, high-performance and easy-to-manage fabric. Based on Voltaire’s custom developed InfiniBand-to-Ethernet silicon, these gateways provide comprehensive layer 4-7 switching at unprecedented packet rates and scalability. The high performance of the Voltaire Ethernet gateways makes them ideal for NAS and IP SAN connectivity. Moreover, these traffic management and layer 4-7 capabilities enable network resource virtualization and high performance grid computing.

Key Features

• High performance InfiniBand-to-10GBE connectivity using Voltaire developed Silicon
• Provides 4 x Gigabit Ethernet or 2×10 Gigabit Ethernet connections when used in conjunction with Voltaire’s Grid Director™ InfiniBand switches.
• TCP/IP protocol offload and termination enables higher application throughput at significantly less CPU overhead
• Wire speed stateful packet filtering, classification, and real-time non intrusive layer 4 traffic monitoring, with support for over 10,000 ternary rules
• VLAN support according to 802.1q – Transparent mapping between Ethernet VLANs and InfiniBand partitions
• IP Multicast support
• 802.3ad link aggregation
• Load sharing and high-availability
• Supports IETF standard IP-over-IB protocol, InfiniBand SDP and iSCSI

Benefits

• High performance connectivity to LANs and Ethernet based storage (NAS or SAN)
• Extremely low latency (< 2 µS)
• Saves additional costs of NICs, cables and Ethernet switches
• Seamless provisioning of virtual networks that span Ethernet and InfiniBand ports
• Highly scalable solution

High Performance IP Connectivity

The Voltaire Ethernet gateways feature an onboard high performance ASIC that provides wire speed TCP/IP protocol processing for four Gigabit Ethernet ports or two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports. To ensure the highest performance, Voltaire Ethernet gateways terminate TCP/IP sessions and relay them to InfiniBand-enabled servers using InfiniBand standard sockets direct protocol (SDP) or IETF standard IP over InfiniBand (IPoIB). The gateways’ unique TCP termination capability isolates servers from the burden of I/O processing overhead that can consume up to 80-90% of server CPU cycles.

Improved Application Performance

By dedicating processing power to the application, Voltaire Ethernet gateways enable data transfer and storage applications to run much faster than solutions without TCP termination. The solution is also ideal for inter-tier networking software such as Oracle OraNet.

Intelligent Layer 4-7 Capabilities

Voltaire Ethernet gateways perform at wire-speed a range of layer 4-7 traffic processing tasks for grid computing, including packet classification, filtering, firewall services, partitioning, in depth traffic monitoring and analysis, layer 4- based load balancing, routing and multi-pathing. Traffic flow management software virtualizes the resources of the servers in the InfiniBand fabric. This powerful feature dynamically distributes traffic among the servers in the fabric, based on user-configurable criteria. It provides security, server virtualization, prioritization and monitoring for optimal server utilization and control.

Scalability and High Availability

For large cluster deployments, a single Voltaire Ethernet gateway can support thousands of nodes. Each gateway optimally distributes the traffic over its 2/4 ports using layer 3-4 hashing and advanced credit based flow control. For systems demanding the utmost scalability, multiple gateways can be pooled to provide greater capacity and automatically distribute the traffic between modules while behaving as a single system image. In addition, a heart-beat monitoring function ensures that a failure by any module in the pool is recovered and the load is redistributed among the remaining modules.

Comprehensive Management

The rich functionality provided by Voltaire’s Ethernet gateways is fully integrated into GridVision™ Fabric Management Software that is embedded in Voltaire Grid Director switches. GridVision is an easy-to-use management suite that provides access through a web based GUI, a command line interface (CLI) and SNMP. Out-of-band management includes InfiniBand, Ethernet and EIA/TIA-232 connections. The management of Voltaire Ethernet gateways is also integrated with leading 3rd party grid and on-demand management platforms.