I am frequently asked by techies why Carbon60 uses InfiniBand technology to power its cloud computing fabric. For many, this is an unusual choice. Despite the fact that half of the world’s most powerful super-computers use InfiniBand, the technology has not made its way into the typical datacenter. The reason for this is simple. Although InfiniBand is a superior technology it is significantly more expensive than even the latest 10G Ethernet technologies. As a result, this technology is typically reserved for money-is-no-object, high performance computing (HPC) applications.
However, this is beginning to change. As large cloud computing architectures have become commonplace, the performance and administrative bottlenecks associated with traditional network and storage fabrics have become a real problem. For example, it is no secret that most commercial cloud computing platforms will not support high I/O workloads unless your applications are built from the ground up overcome their inherent limitations.
Just as VMware itself now uses InfiniBand technology to power its own cloud computing platform, large enterprises and premium managed service providers like Carbon60 are now turning to unified InfiniBand fabrics to deliver the necessary performance, manageability and flexibility to power their cloud computing infrastructures.