Infiniband SAN

[James]

I bought a big book on SANs last week, probably going to buy another next paycheck. Honestly, I think that using Infiniband for storage networking is fairly new, as the book I bought didn't really cover it and only mentioned it in passing (the usual 'it's used in HPC...'). Just searching for 'Infiniband' on Amazon yields next to nothing.

Are you doing this relatively soon or is this just an idea? Because CNAs are starting to creep onto the market, I don't know if FCoE requires a special switch compared to 10GbE or not. Obviously not as fast, but it's going to be hard to use 20Gb/s for just storage.

Agreed. It is more of a "headroom" thing.

And no, this isn't near future. I've just been researching SAN technology. I've become disillusioned with both iSCSI and FC as of late, because neither offers the scalability that I'm looking for. As for 10GbE, the adapters and switches for that are actually more expensive than the Infiniband adapters. So yeah, I'd go Infiniband before 10GbE. (Though that would be sweet on the networking side.) I just find it amusing that a lot of the sites I look at for infiniband talk about all of these awesome adapters that allow you high speed connections to your storage unit, but none of them actually offer or describe the storage units.