InfiniBand Network used to store and integrate data centers

InfiniBand now plays a key role in high-speed network architecture technology. By aggregating computing nodes in a computer cluster to accelerate computing performance, InfiniBand has made great strides in the field of high-performance computing. Although the InfiniBand Network performs better in terms of high bandwidth, low latency, and overall cost efficiency, there is still a long way to go for the widely used InfiniBand Network. But as my colleague Mike Matchett mentioned in a recent report, application cases aside from high-performance computing make InfiniBand networks not an indispensable core technology for enterprise data centers, it is also a noteworthy choice.

InfiniBand implements centralized management of network interconnection protocols through a flat switching architecture. Unlike Ethernet, it was designed for low-latency, high-bandwidth, and non-lost network transmission from the very beginning. InfiniBand is an ideal technology for data center architecture integration. InfiniBand aims to reduce deployed computing devices and deploy redundant computing devices in a homogeneous environment. In intensive infrastructure, InfiniBand supports several network protocols to provide services simultaneously through a single cable. Therefore, InfiniBand can provide flexible and high-performance network interconnection services in a highly virtualized computing environment.

The InfiniBand Network is better than Ethernet in terms of bandwidth, latency, and overall cost. The InfiniBand Network is gradually being used by data centers. Through interviews with end users, InfiniBand has the core role and position in the following new fields:

• Big Data Environment and large databases
• Virtual cloud infrastructure
• Scalable network applications
• Horizontal extended shared storage

Application Case 1: continuous explosion of big data

Big Data solution providers such as Oracle Exadata have deployed InfiniBand on their devices for several years. For horizontally scalable applications that require high-speed computing capabilities and a large amount of internal data streams, infiniBand is an ideal exchange structure solution.

Users who are deploying open-source Hadoop should understand how their big data Clusters become more powerful in the InfiniBand Network, compared with the traditional 10 GB Ethernet, the InfiniBand Network in the hadoop cluster doubles the analysis throughput because fewer computing nodes are required, which saves much more cost than the InfiniBand Network deployment.

As long as data continues to grow in capacity and variety, high-performance data exchange will remain a huge challenge for the data center network, as a result, the high-bandwidth and Low-latency InfiniBand Network makes it a competitive alternative.

Case 2: Virtual I/O of a virtual data center

To meet the availability and performance of key applications in a virtual environment, IT must virtualize the entire I/O data path, including shared storage and connection networks. In turn, the I/O data path, multi-Protocol and dynamic configuration must be supported.

To enhance the mobility of virtual machines running critical programs, virtual machines must be able to seamlessly and quickly migrate the entire network and storage to another place. This means that the physical architecture supporting its operation must be connected to each host equally. However, because hosts generally have different physical NICs and physical network connections, seamless migration of virtual machines has become a challenge. An aggregation and flat network architecture like InfiniBand provides a huge pipeline that can be dynamically allocated on demand, making it ideal in a tight, highly mobile virtual environment.

Case 3: horizontally scalable webpages need to be closely connected

The infrastructure required by Web applications not only supports virtualized cloud computing resources, but also requires additional mobility and sensitivity to support dynamic reconfiguration, you do not have to worry about the existing data streams or existing connection requirements. Therefore, InfiniBand's flat address space is a huge and practical benefit for service providers and large web-based businesses.

For applications with large data streams and small data volumes (such as random storage read/write, remote memory direct read/write, and Message Queue, reducing network latency by half under the same conditions can greatly improve the basic performance and throughput of applications, greatly reducing infrastructure requirements and greatly reducing costs.

Case 4: highly intensive device sharing and Convergence

As devices in the data center become increasingly intensive, users are using the frontend network to match the backend bandwidth to maximize the utilization of assets. In other words, if InfiniBand can be used as a high-performance, horizontally scalable storage system, it should also be a choice for storage front-end connections.

Recently, the popular trend of extended server-side storage requires an architecture like InfiniBand that is better than advanced cache. It either directly shares data between servers or closely integrates external shared storage devices. Taking into account the actual effect of storage and server, it can simultaneously process front-end storage I/O and back-end storage I/O, so the InfiniBand Network can play a very outstanding role.

InfiniBand is becoming mainstream

InfiniBand was used only for high-performance computing and a few special occasions in the past, but now virtualization, cloud computing and big data make InfiniBand more and more as an architecture solution.