The changing data center landscape

Recently, Taneja Group published what has become an annual report reviewing the state of InfiniBand in mainstream IT. Once again, the landscape has evolved in interesting ways this year, with the virtual infrastructure and cloud computing being a couple of the forces that are driving InfiniBand adoption in the enterprise data center. Long story short, InfiniBand has proved itself a capable platform for continued evolution, and vendors with products in this space have long ago figured out how to make the fabric into a platform. While us bleeding edge technologists speculate about what infrastructure as a service is going to look like, the most common names in InfiniBand have long ago turned the infrastructure fabric into a service enabled platform. Slightly different twists, but you need a service enabled platform behind your infrastructure as a service, and with a service enabled platform you can turn your own infrastructure into a well managed service, with granular and comprehensive management. I'll illustrate this in more depth, but first a link.

The Taneja Group InfiniBand publication is available on the InfiniBand Trade Association website - www.infinibandta.org - and will be up for download via the Taneja Group website soon.

Now back to the story - don't stop at this report and think that you have all of the story. How is InfiniBand service enabled? It is a bigger picture than just the mechanics of InfiniBand switching and how data is transferred to host processes. InfiniBand has been engineered for extensibility and can in turn be a platform for innovation. Take for example Voltaire. I've recently been given a tour of the Voltaire Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) solution. UFM builds on the architecture of Voltaire switches in order to extend their capabilities with an even more intelligent management layer. That management layer can provide more intelligent routing in a layer above the fabric, while integrating with and leveraging core fabric routing and management technologies. More importantly, UFM can dive deep into the fabric to give real insight into total infrastructure activities and performance. So far, I haven't seen any other solutions claiming to be a "fabric manager" offer the sophisticated insight, resource management, performance trending, and core fabric function extension that UFM can. UFM is just one example, but it fully illustrates what a well architected fabric should be capable of. The fabric shouldn't be an invisible lower layer of connectivity, managed within a separate operational domain. The fabric should be integrated with all aspects of your infrastructure.

My take, all the hubub about new emerging fabrics is earning the ear of the enterprise customer. Whether those fabrics can deliver as a platform for extending enterprise computing capabilities will be judged in its own time. Meanwhile, these conversations are opening doors for new opportunities, and InfiniBand is poised to deliver, and with the door open, the differences between fabrics are starting to make themselves apparent. If the challenge is big enough to warrant a new approach, that's where we are finding users bringing InfiniBand into the mainstream enterprise.