Today E8 Storage announced availability of InfiniBand support to its high performance, NVMe storage solutions. The move comes as a direct response to HPC customers that wish to take advantage of the high speed, low latency throughput of InfiniBand for their data hungry applications. E8 Storage support for InfiniBand will be seamless for customers who now have the flexibility to connect via Ethernet or InfiniBand when paired with Mellanox ConnectX InfiniBand/VPI adapters.
Today we demonstrate once again that E8 Storage’s architecture can expand, evolve and always extract the full potential of flash performance,” comments Zivan Ori, co-founder and CEO of E8 Storage. “Partnering with market leaders like Mellanox that deliver the very best network connectivity technology ensures we continue to meet and, frequently, exceed the needs of our HPC customers even in their most demanding environments.”
As our economy becomes more digitally-defined, HPC environments play a critical role in unlocking and harnessing the transformational power of data,” commented Scott Sinclair, senior analyst at ESG. “InfiniBand connectivity combined with the full potential of flash as delivered by E8 Storage is an almost unstoppable partnership in terms of speed, low latency and scalability. Together, this makes E8 Storage and Mellanox a powerful combination for data center implementations and for databases that drive financial trading systems, real-time data analytics, and healthcare applications.”
The announcement also strengthens E8 Storage’s long-standing technology partnership with Mellanox that originally enabled the integration of E8 Storage’s rack scale flash architecture with selected Mellanox adapters. Today, this relationship allows E8 Storage systems to attach directly to existing RDMA high performance networks over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) or InfiniBand connections and makes E8 Storage’s full support of InfiniBand possible especially in HPC environments where the majority of InfiniBand adoption is occurring. Like Ethernet, the InfiniBand products perform at 100Gb/s allowing enhanced scalability as E8 Storage solutions are deployed.
According to the most recent Top 500 supercomputer rankings (Nov 2017), InfiniBand is the second most-used internal system interconnect technology. Further, in a recent evaluation by Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing for HPC products at Mellanox Technologies, Mellanox accounts for 62 percent share of the compute clustering of the true HPC systems.
We are very pleased that E8 Storage is expanding this partnership to offer full support for our InfiniBand products. Working closely together, our combined products can deliver the lightning-fast and highly scalable network necessary to power data intensive applications, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning that now drive today’s economy,” stated Scot Schultz, Senior Director, HPC/AI and Technical Computing, Mellanox Technologies.
E8 Storage software and appliances with InfiniBand support are available now.