InfiniBand addresses the challenges IT infrastructures face as more demands are placed on the interconnect with ever-increasing demands for computing and storage resources. Specifically, InfiniBand has the following advantages:
- Superior performance: InfiniBand is the only shipping solution that supports 40Gb/s host connectivity and 120Gb/s switch to switch links.
- Low-Latency: InfiniBand's ultra-low latencies, with measured delays of 1µs end to end, greatly accelerating many data center and high-performance computing (HPC) applications.
- High-efficiency: InfiniBand provides direct support of advanced reliable transport protocols such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) to enhance the efficiency of customer workload processing.
- Cost effectiveness: InfiniBand Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) and switches are very competitively priced and create a compelling price/performance advantage over alternative technologies.
- Fabric consolidation and low energy usage: InfiniBand can consolidate networking, clustering, and storage data over a single fabric which significantly lowers the overall power, real estate and management overhead required for servers and storage.
- Reliable, stable connections: InfiniBand is perfectly suited to meet the mission-critical needs of today's enterprise by enabling fully redundant and lossless I/O fabrics, with automatic path failover and link layer multi-pathing abilities to meet the highest levels of availability.
- Data integrity: InfiniBand enables the highest levels of data integrity by performing cyclic redundancy checks (CRCs) at each fabric hop and end-to-end across the fabric to ensure the data is correctly transferred.
- Rich, growing ecosystem: InfiniBand is at the center of an ecosystem that includes open-source software distribution from the OpenFabrics Alliance, innovative and cost-effective cabling, and long-haul solutions that reach outside the data center and across the globe.