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| [November 15, 2012] |
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Obsidian Welcomes Mellanox and its MetroX Product into the Long Haul InfiniBand Market
SALT LAKE CITY --(Business Wire)--
Mellanox's (News - Alert) recent announcement at the Supercomputing 2012 event of a
soon to be released product capable of extending 10Gbits/s InfiniBand
fabrics over as much as 10 km has been welcomed by the market pioneer
and leader, Obsidian.
The importance of range-extension for the very high performance but
intrinsically short-reach InfiniBand protocol is not lost on Obsidian,
which first demonstrated the capability with its Longbow products at the
same Supercomputing conference seven years earlier in Seattle.
Obsidian's CVO, Dr. David Southwell recalls: "In 2005, Obsidian
demonstrated three wide area InfiniBand links encapsulated inside
standard SONET and ATM WAN protocols, connecting the show's internal
super network - SCInet - to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
in California (1,300 km), Intel's (News - Alert) HPC facility in Dupont, WA (100 km)
and a cross country path to the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington,
DC. While the 5,000 km link to NRL was by far the longest InfiniBand
link demonstrated at that time, it was the relatively short 100 km run
to Intel's Dupont facility that possibly did more to raise the awareness
of the potential for long haul InfiniBand. Then Microsoft (News - Alert) CEO Bill
Gates, using partners Intel, Cisco and Obsidian, wa able to make use of
the high performance link during his key note address to migrate a large
HPC data set to an Intel supercomputer in Dupont, allowing the results
to rapidly migrate back in real time during his talk - actually an early
demonstration of HPC cloud before the term had been coined."
Dr. Southwell continued, "While Obsidian's team of experts have gone on
to develop a suite of capability sets including native InfiniBand
routing, encryption/authentication, long-distance standards-based WDM
devices, file migration software, diagnostic tools and more recently in
collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and NASA Ames
Research Center subnet management for compound topologies, we remain
very passionate about long haul InfiniBand. We understand the demands of
spanning HPC LAN and optical WAN domains in a single device, of rigorous
standards compliance and carrier grade reliability. As Mellanox attempts
to expand their sphere of expertise starting with stretched LANs of up
to 10km with a view to stepping up to the full gambit of optical
capability in the future, we wish them every success in our marketplace."
"I can recall when Dr. Southwell and I met with Eyal several years ago
to discuss incorporating long haul IB in their SDR switch," remarked
Bill Halina, Obsidian's Chairman, "in the fast paced technology world
it's truly inspiring to see vision turn into reality and ultimately find
its way into everyone's home."
Meet the Obsidian team at SC12 (Convention Center, Salt Lake City,
UT) in booth #4052 from November 12th to 15th.
About Obsidian Strategics
Obsidian Strategics™ is the developer of Longbow™, a series of
InfiniBand products featuring range extension, routing and encryption.
Longbow technology allows an InfiniBand fabric, normally a short-range
network used in high-performance computing, to be extended via optical
fiber over varying distances. Longbow connects across Campus, Metro or
Global networks to enable unparalleled real-time backup over
long-distance, high-bandwidth video transmission and efficient movement
of large data sets to compute and storage resources. www.obsidianstrategics.com.
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