Today Mellanox announced that IBM has selected the company’s ConnectX-4 EDR InfiniBand adapters and EDR 100Gb/s IB switch systems for their new Power Systems LC line of servers designed for cloud environments and high performance cluster deployments and infused with OpenPOWER-based innovations. The technology will be utilized in the servers and high performance computing clusters as a part of an open architecture model which will feature technology from IBM, Mellanox and several other members of the OpenPOWER Foundation.
Enterprises today are looking for dynamic solutions that can process data-intensive applications, such as big data analytics, streaming web services and other cloud-based services,” said Stefanie Chiras, director and business line executive for Scale-Out Power Systems of IBM. “These applications are putting an ever increasing amount of strain on their networks and require extremely powerful systems. Implementing an architecture based on open collaboration between industry leaders ensures that our customers have a system that is capable of meeting their performance demands, but is also supremely efficient and cost-effective.”
Mellanox’s ConnectX-4 adapter cards with Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) support both EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand and 100Gb/s Ethernet connectivity, and are the most powerful, flexible solutions for today’s emerging data center. Mellanox’s EDR InfiniBand switch family provides industry-leading processing efficiency, with features such as static routing, adaptive routing and advanced congestion management. These combined features ensure the maximum effective fabric bandwidth by eliminating processing bottlenecks.
“IT administrators have embraced open architectures as a cost-effective way to advance the processing power of their high-performance computing workloads,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing for Mellanox. “Mellanox intelligent interconnect solutions provide our clients with a competitive advantage and the ability to differentiate their systems by enabling flexibility and innovations.”
Additional contributors for the new Power Systems LC Servers from the OpenPOWER Foundation include Canonical, NVIDIA, Tyan and Wistron. The OpenPOWER Foundation, an organization with more than 150 members worldwide, builds solutions on top of the open architecture of IBM’s POWER processor. Open and collaborative server architectures have gained increased popularity from IT administrators who are looking to accelerate innovation at a rate that is not capable from closed system models.
The Power Systems LC line of servers are set to be available later this year and will be offered in three different variations; the Power Systems S812LC, the Power Systems S822LC for commercial computing and the Power Systems S822LC for high performance computing.
