Over at the HP Blog, Steve Barry writes that the days of Blade servers being hampered by the limitations of top-of-rack switches may be over thanks to new technology from Mellanox. Designed specifically for customers that demand performance and raw bandwidth the Mellanox SX1018HP blade switch provides up to sixteen 40Gb server downlinks and up to eighteen 40Gb network uplinks for an amazing 1.3Tb/s of throughput.
For customers currently running Infiniband networks, the appeal of being able to collapse their data requirements onto a single network has always been tempered by the lack of support for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) on Ethernet networks. Again, HP and Mellanox lead the way in blade switches. The SX1018HP supports RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) allowing those RDMA tuned applications to work across both Infiniband and Ethernet networks. When coupled with the recently announced HP544M 40Gb Ethernet/FDR Infiniband adapter, customers can now support RDMA end to end on either network and begin the migration to a single Ethernet infrastructure.
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