Cisco doubles up on Infiniband gear

Ethernet management marriage too

By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View • Get more from this author

Posted in Data Networking, 27th June 2006 21:15 GMT

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Cisco Systems has spruced up its line of Infiniband switches with a bandwidth double-up and new management software links that let customers control both Ethernet and Infiniband switches from one spot.

The new Cisco SFS 7000D Series DDR (double data rate) switches boast a boost in bandwidth from 10 to 20 Gbit/s. The systems are refreshed versions of the products Cisco started selling last September and come from Cisco's buy of Topspin Communications. Officially, the new gear starts shipping in August, but Cisco wants you to hear about it now.

Customers can pick 24, 144 and 288 switches, although the larger systems aren't old Topspin gear at all. Instead, Cisco OEMs the fatties from SilverStorm.

Both SilverStorm and Voltaire have already been pumping out DDR kit, making Cisco late to the game.

Cisco, however, hopes to counter its tardiness with convenience. Customers with the CiscoWorks LAN Management Solution (LMS) software can now work with both Ethernet and Infiniband gear from the same console.

Jerry Harris of Stanford's Center for Computational Earth and Environmental Science was so moved by the shared management addition that he offered up his good name to Cisco via a canned quotation.

"Because Cisco offers an integrated, compute cluster framework, we can take advantage of unified management and intelligence between our InfiniBand compute network and Ethernet management network," Harris said, in a Cisco statement. "With these capabilities we can build a reliable, high performance, low latency fabric which will scale to thousands of nodes and can deliver tangible benefits that directly influence our productivity."

Congratulations go to Cisco's art department as well for finally removing the Topspin logo from this product photo and replacing it with a Cisco brand. ®

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