IBM Delivers Infiniband To SoftLayer Customers

As more organizations take advantage of cloud computing, there is a corresponding quest to achieve the highest possible levels of performance from the cloud. One of the bottlenecks in terms of cloud infrastructure is the speed at which the network links between servers can run. When absolute performance is needed, even a tiny delay in these links can impact upon service levels. This is where Infiniband comes in.

Infiniband is a high performance networking technology that is an industry-standard networking architecture. Infiniband delivers high transfer speeds—up to 56Gbps—between compute nodes. As IBM points out (rather irrelevantly but to give a sense of perspective) that is the equivalent of transferring data from more than 30,000 Blu-ray discs in a single day. Alongside pure speed, the Infiniband architecture provides additional features, offering better reliability, availability, and serviceability than traditional PCI bus and other proprietary switch fabrics and I/O solutions. Clearly it’s a valuable addition to a data center.

So it’s positive to see IBM starting to offer Infiniband as an option to customers of its subsidiary SoftLayer’s bare metal servers. IBM is pushing the fact that this move is perfect for computationally intensive applications and brings High Performance Computing (HPC) to a previously unobtainable price point. For the record, Infiniband is used in over 200 of the top 500 supercomputers globally – good company indeed!

Cloud infrastructure leader AWS noticeably doesn't offer Infiniband relying on regular old Ethernet connections. AWS does offer an enhanced option however that is designed to turbo-charge Ethernet to up its performance. Microsoft does support Infiniband for some of its virtual server types.

Interestingly ProfitBricks, a feisty cloud infrastructure vendor, has long differentiated itself from others in a couple of ways, firstly in terms of the server flexibility offer and secondly through offering Infiniband. IBM coming to the party is a validation that Infiniband is, for at least some customers, highly attractive. According to a spokesman, pricing for Infiniband hasn't yet been set but it will be priced "at a premium to other SoftLayer services".

It’s refreshing to see IBM come out again and again with gutsy announcements. The way they’re handling the SoftLayer acquisition is absolutely an example of best practice when it comes to M&A. IBM isn’t usually mentioned in the same breath as the big names in cloud infrastructure, but they’re certainly getting closer.