Extending InfiniBand^® Over Metro and Wide Area NetworksExtending InfiniBand^® Over Metro and Wide Area Networks

The InfiniBand Distance Challenge

While InfiniBand provides many benefits within the data center, InfiniBand's inherent distance limitations require close proximity for system and storage connectivity, making it unsuitable for deployment beyond a single site. The challenge has been how to link together geographically isolated data centers to form a single unified InfiniBand fabric for sharing compute and storage resources.

Bridging the Data Center Gap

Built around Bay Microsystems' own innovative network processor and traffic management integrated circuit technology, the ABEx 2020 Multiservice Transport Gateway enables administrators to overcome distance limitations using enhanced buffering and flow control to extend InfiniBand reliably over Metro and Wide Area Networks spanning from just a few kilometers to virtually any point on the globe.

The ABEx 2020 provides flexible connectivity options delivering line rate 4X InfiniBand SDR (10 Gbps) performance over Optical Transport Networks and Packet Switched Networks. This allows ABEx to transparently transport native InfiniBand over most Wide Area Network technologies including 10G Ethernet, ATM, IP, SONET/SDH OC-48/192, WDM and dark fiber.

In addition, the ABEx 2020 works with all InfiniBand protocol types providing a seamless application framework between data centers supporting disaster recovery, market data feeds, real-time database mirroring, high performance computing, storage virtualization, and much more.

Production Ready

The ABEx 2020 removes InfiniBand distance limitations and offers seamless Wide Area Network extension of your global data centers for High Performance/Cloud Computing, Oil and Gas, Financial, Research and Development, and Government applications in a compact, enterprise-class platform. Proven in real-world deployments of 15,000 km, ABEx is ready for production environments today.

Reduced Costs with Unified Fabrics

With storage and processing demands on the rise, scaling both your application and storage area networks can be costly as well as operationally challenging. One way to reduce data center infrastructure costs is to switch to a unified fabric for all your computing needs. There are numerous interconnect technology choices, so picking the right one that will scale with your business needs is critical.

Performance and Reliability

With its mature ecosystem and proven reliability, InfiniBand is recognized as the industry's leading standards-based interconnect technology in terms of performance and cost. Deployed in thousands of production environments throughout the world, InfiniBand delivers the lowest latency of any interconnect available and provides plenty of bandwidth to move even the largest data sets with ease. InfiniBand supports up to 120 Gigabit interfaces today with an industry backed roadmap to deliver higher bandwidths as future business demands. As a result, InfiniBand is quickly becoming the preferred fabric technology for high performance computing and mass-storage environments.