Today Mellanox rolled out what it’s calling the “world’s first” high-density, 36-Port 40 Gigabit Ethernet switches. Designed for server and storage connectivity, the SX1000 switches enable converged, scalable fabrics using the company’s recently announced SwitchX silicon.
When using the SX-1000 family of switches in a 1,000-node configuration, data center operators can save up to 84 percent of the power, reduce rack space by 50 percent and consolidate up to 75 percent of inter-rack cables. The higher speed 40GbE backbone overcomes common bottlenecks and network congestion caused by east/west traffic and storage, and provides up to 10x lower latencies, thus ensuring faster application performance.
In related news from Interop, Mellanox introduced application acceleration technology for Hadoop and Memcached, popular open source software platforms used for distributed computing and memory object caching.
Network bandwidth and usage of compute capacity per node to process network-related functions are key factors that limit efficient scale of Hadoop clusters,” said Dhruba Borthakur, distinguished member of the Hadoop Apache Development Team. “Hadoop-Direct with Mellanox networking solutions help minimize the latency of data access; the use of higher bandwidth enables overlapping communications and computation thus improving Hadoop cluster’s performance.”
To learn more, check out this video presentation by D.K. Panda and Sayantan Sur of Ohio State University: Can HPC Interconnects Benefit MemCached And Hadoop?
