Mellanox Marries InfiniBand To Blade Server Architecture

Mellanox Technologies

The company's Nitro reference design is the first server blade design to include InfiniBand, a high-speed, highly scalable method for connecting servers, storage and communications devices, said Byron Longmire, director of product marketing at the company.

Nitro is currently available to OEM server builders to study as a reference to building InfiniBand blade servers, Longmire said. Included in the design are fully functioning server blades based on 1.3GHz Pentium III processors, switch blades with four 10 Gbps external port, I/O blades for connecting Fibre Channel, Ethernet and SCSI devices and an 18-blade backplane for connecting 16 InfiniBand server or I/O blades and two switches.

The passive backplane puts all the connectivity of multiple servers in one location to eliminate the dozens of cables typically found with rack-mount servers and helping to cut service calls, Longmire said.

The switch blades offer dual redundancy, he said. Using the switches, up to five chassis with a total of 80 InfiniBand server blades can be connected together, he said.

The Nitro reference design is a complete working blade server system, but it is being offered only to OEM server vendors, Longmire said. OEMs are using the system to design their own products, but Longmire would not confirm which OEMs are considering the Nitro platform or when they would start bringing such products to market.

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