Then there's Infiniband, offering four times the speed of already-speedy Ethernet, at lower cost.
InfiniBand - Derived from "infinite bandwidth." A switched-fabric I/O technology that ties together servers, storage devices and network devices, easing the bottlenecks created by data-intensive files such as streaming video, voice and audio.
Unlike Ethernet, however, Infiniband doesn't prefer to communicate with top-heavy servers running on a Windows OS. Shunning the mass market in favor primarily of high- end performance shops, Infiniband likes Unix or Linux equipment. Implemented with high-speed data storage and processing, it provides unprecedented performance for high-speed computation.
HP supports 40Gbps 4x Quad Data Rate (QDR) and 20Gbps 4X Double Data Rate (DDR) InfiniBand products that include mezzanine Host Channel Adapters (HCA) for server blades, switch blades for c-Class enclosures, and rack switches and cables for building scale-out solutions.
The following InfiniBand products based on QLogic technology are available for the HP BladeSystem c-Class from HP:
