Mellanox announced today that they will be supplying mezzanine adapters and switches for the new HP c3000/c7000 blade enclosures powered by their ConnectX Infiniband silicon. The release is initially targeted at midsize companies looking to capitalize on blade compute platforms without sacrificing performance.
“The Mellanox ConnectX IB InfiniBand products further build on the leadership I/O capabilities of the HP BladeSystem c7000, providing superior connectivity that enables increased productivity at a price/performance unseen before by mid-market customers and businesses with small IT sites and remote offices.”
Mezzanine cards will reside locally on each blade server, providing two Infiniband ports connected to PCI-Express. The mezzanine cards and switches have been tested with OFED 1.2.5.
Read the full release here.
This look like another form factor for the HCA Mellanox announced in the spring. I wonder what Qlogic/PathScale are doing with their low latency HCA, haven’t heard much on that lately.
I wonder if Mellanox can load share across the 2 IB ports, or if it’s just a sparing scenario.
I’m not sure if Mellanox can do it at the hardware level or not. I know with MVAPICH MPI, you can certainly bond the two ports. Its especially advantageous to do so in multi-rail fabrics.