SoftLayer adds InfiniBand to cloud services portfolio.
IBM has announced that InfiniBand links will be available as a networking option for customers using bare metal servers from SoftLayer, an IBM Company. Adding InfiniBand support enables very high network throughput and low latency between bare metal servers. Ideal for computationally intensive activities common to energy companies and big data applications, this solution makes High Performance Computing (HPC) even more accessible on the cloud capabilities
“As more and more companies migrate their toughest workloads to the cloud, many are now demanding that vendors provide high speed networking performance to keep up,” said SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby. “Our InfiniBand support is helping to push the technological envelope on what can be done on the cloud today. It showcases our innovation when collaborating with customers to help them solve complex business issues.”
InfiniBand is an industry-standard networking architecture that delivers high transfer speeds—up to 56Gbps—between compute nodes. That is the equivalent of transferring data from more than 30,000 Blu-ray discs in a single day. The architecture provides additional features, contributing to InfinBand’s overall superior reliability, availability, and serviceability over legacy PCI bus and other proprietary switch fabrics and I/O solutions.
These advantages bring SoftLayer customers even lower latency between bare metal servers, applicable to private clusters of servers with up to hundreds of compute nodes, ideal for computing solutions for applications such as life sciences and genomics, computer aided engineering, financial services, electronics design and reservoir simulation. By reducing latency between bare metal servers in these private clusters customers can easily manage massive amounts of data faster, more effectively and efficiently.
“Bringing InfiniBand capability to the cloud is driven by the growing need for extremely high levels of speed and performance for scenarios such as HPC and big data”, said Philbert Shih, managing director for Structure Research. “This type of offering will help enable engineers and scientists to build, compute, and analyze simulations in real time leveraging hundreds of compute nodes. Being able to share and analyze data at this speed will only accelerate cloud adoption from this use case, while making HPC performance more accessible across a wide variety of industries.”
The introduction on InfiniBand on SoftLayer will especially benefit customers who are leveraging fully supported, ready-to-run clusters complete with code name IBM Elastic Storage, IBM Platform LSF or Platform Symphony workload management. InfiniBand will be available on SoftLayer through the IBM Platform Computing team, expected in the third quarter of 2014. For more information or to add it to an existing SoftLayer account, please visit, IBM Platform Computing Cloud Service or contact or contact Terry Fisher, Global Sales Leader at [email protected].
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