Features - Storage Innovations:

JNI, TOPSPIN DEMONSTRATE 10 GB STORAGE, SERVER TECHNOLOGIES

JNI Corporation and Topspin Communications demonstrated the high performance capabilities of InfiniBand at Oracle World in San Francisco last week. The demonstration combined high-speed storage for Oracle databases using the Direct Access File System (DAFS) protocol and a clustered Oracle RAC database running on the user level Direct Access Provider Layer (uDAPL) library ­- both over a single 10 Gb InfiniBand fabric. DAFS is a high-performance file access technology designed for next-generation clustered server environments and uDAPL is a low-latency memory-to-memory application programming interface (API) developed for application clustering across high-speed fabrics.

The demonstration showcased technologies from Network Appliance, JNI, Topspin and Oracle. It consists of a two-node Oracle 9i RAC configuration running file I/O over DAFS and an interprocess communication (IPC) layer for clustering over uDAPL, as well as a single-node Oracle 10g database running file I/O over DAFS. It employs a NetApp FAS940 storage system, Dell 2650 servers, JNI¹s IBX-4x02 InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter (HCA) running both DAFS and uDAPL on Red Hat Linux, a Topspin 90 switch, and Topspin HCAs running uDAPL on Red Hat Linux.

"This demo delivers on the promise of InfiniBand -- to support multiple protocols on a single fabric while delivering industry-leading performance," said Steve Kleiman, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Network Appliance. "The success of this demonstration is a very important milestone for the InfiniBand movement."

"The demonstration shown at Oracle World represents a number of milestones," said Phil Brotherton, vice president of marketing at JNI Corporation. "It shows the performance advantages achieved by using DAFS storage for conventional databases and uDAPL for database clustering, as well as demonstrating that multiple products can interoperate in real application environments."

"With uDAPL and DAFS over InfiniBand, our customers can now maximize price/performance value for both servers and storage," said Stu Aaron, vice president of marketing at Topspin. "Leveraging uDAPL and our work with Oracle, we enable commodity server clusters to deliver the equivalent performance of high-end servers at a fraction of the price. With DAFS, we enable cost-effective network attached storage (NAS) to finally rival SAN performance. Topspin is excited to be a part of this great milestone."

uDAPL And DAFS Technology

The uDAPL library is designed to take advantage of emerging memory-to-memory cluster interconnect technology standards such as InfiniBand and RDMA over TCP/IP. uDAPL enables applications to access network interface hardware without operating system intervention and to carry out bulk data transfers directly between application buffers with minimal CPU overhead. DAFS builds upon uDAPL by providing a file-based storage protocol with high bandwidth, low latency, and very low CPU overhead. Both uDAPL and DAFS are emerging as key enabling technologies for a new generation of high-performance, highly scalable, clustered databases and other mission-critical data center applications.