PSARC 2010/251 FC over IB support.

On Saturday i wrote about the new converged networking adapter in the Oracle portfolio. However you shouldn’t forget that there is a second possible interconnect for a single-fabric network (converged IP and SAN fabric). It’s Infiniband - delivering 40 GBit/s for a while now and 104 GBit/s in 2011 (they are changing the coding scheme thus yielding better data rates). That said a single fabric network is nothing without two things: At first gateways into legacy networks like LAN or SAN. This can be adressed with components like the BridgeX stuff from Mellanox (for example an Infiniband to 10GbE/8 GB SAN gateway). The other part - and thats the reason why i’m writing this article - is something in the operating system that is capable to speak with such a gateways. With PSARC/2010/251 there is a case waiting for approval to implement this other component, to implement “Fibre Channel over IB Support” in Opensolaris. BTW: When you search for a reason to use Infiniband, you should search for the 802.3ba papers for 40 GBit/s or 100 GBit/s Ethernet … this won’t be cheap … we talk about totally different components here.