SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Following through with its announcement at IBM's Information On Demand conference last month, Obsidian is demonstrating its new Longbow C400 InfiniBand range extenders at Supercomputing 2012. Longbow C400 provides a four-fold throughput boost over the established 100-series Longbow by running at 4X QDR LAN speeds – yet is capable of moving files at 4GBytes/s over 50 miles or more. The company is also revealing the specifications of the first member of the Crossbow family, the soon-to-be-released R400. Obsidian CrossbowTM is a dedicated multi-port router, allowing complex InfiniBand topologies comprising multiple subnets, managed by Obsidian BGFCTM, a sophisticated subnet management system.
Dr. David Southwell, Obsidian's CVO, explains the company's Longbow C400 design strategy - “InfiniBand LAN speeds hit 40Gbits/s some time ago, but while 40G wavelengths are possible on the optical WAN they are not widely available and remain far more expensive to provision than standard 10G circuits. With C400 we took a hybrid approach, channeling the 40G WAN traffic over four 10G circuits, typically provisioned as separate wavelengths within a Wavelength Division Multiplex (WDM) system on a single fiber pair. End-to-end InfiniBand connectivity is preserved even as individual WAN wavelengths may fail.”
Obsidian complements the C400 with the A-CWDM81 companion device which performs the optical multiplex/ demultiplex functions necessary to carry two 4X QDR range-extended InfiniBand links (as well as a bonus 10G Ethernet or Fiber Channel circuit) over a single fiber pair across a campus or metro area network.
Longbow C400/A-CWDM81s provide low latency, protocol transparent InfiniBand range extension, enabling such applications as remote cluster aggregation, multi-building supercomputer expansion, distributed InfiniBand Storage Area Networks and remote visualization services.
“The upcoming Crossbow R400s will provide six-port 4X QDR InfiniBand routing functions in the same ¼ 1RU form-factor as the Longbow C400 and A-CWDM81 devices,” said Dr. Southwell, “allowing architects to assemble various InfiniBand functions in flexible high density rack mount configurations.”
When combined with BGFC, featuring numerous enhancements over existing solutions, 400-series Longbow and Crossbow devices will enable very fast, large, robust and secure geographically distributed InfiniBand fabrics comprising many subnets, management domains and diverse local topologies.
Meet the Obsidian team at SC12 (Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT) in booth #4052 from November 12th to 15th.
About Obsidian Strategics
Obsidian Strategics™ is the developer of Longbow™, a series of InfiniBand products featuring range extension, routing and encryption. Longbow technology allows an InfiniBand fabric, normally a short-range network used in high-performance computing, to be extended via optical fiber over varying distances. Longbow connects across Campus, Metro or Global networks to enable unparalleled real-time backup over long-distance, high-bandwidth video transmission and efficient movement of large data sets to compute and storage resources. www.obsidianstrategics.com.