Obsidian Strategics With QLogic

Obsidian Strategics, Inc., the developer of Longbow, a series of InfiniBand products featuring range-extension, routing and encryption, is collaborating with QLogic Corp.. Obsidian joined the QLogic NETtrack partner program to provide solutions and deliver products and support to joint InfiniBand customers. Additionally, Obsidian announced sponsorship of the QLogic NETtrack Developer Center facility by contributing X Series and C Series Longbows to allow users to directly evaluate equipment interoperability and system-level performance. This collaboration leverages the Longbow’s latency injection capability to simulate arbitrary optical network distances between powerful QLogic-enabled clusters.

Longbow Campus transparently extends
InfiniBand fabrics over
up to 40km of dark fiber

“As a leader in native InfiniBand range-extension, routing and encryption, it was a natural progression for Obsidian to join the QLogic NETtrack program,” says Dr. David Southwell, president of Obsidian Strategics. “We are pleased to collaborate with QLogic, and to align with them as a strategic partner.”

InfiniBand is a very high-performance open-standard network protocol that is intrinsically limited to very short connections measured in just meters. Obsidian’s Longbow products transparently range-extend InfiniBand over standard optical networks, while also offering unique refinements such as full line-rate inter-subnet routing and encryption functions. Obsidian’s Longbow X Series devices are designed for long-haul InfiniBand over OC-192 or 10GbEthernet Metro, Regional or Global wide area networks. The complimentary Longbow C Series products transparently extend InfiniBand fabrics over up to 40km of dedicated fiber or WDM channel – ideal for small-footprint solutions requiring Campus or Metro area networks. Both solutions provide unsurpassed bandwidth efficiency and latency characteristics as alternatives to TCP/IP transport.

The QLogic NETtrack program provides its alliance partners with access to the resources they need to create, test and certify their solutions’ interoperability with QLogic storage and high performance clustering technologies. The program is designed to provide the building blocks for partner companies to certify and optimize SAN and HPC solutions. The partnership with Obsidian Strategics will ultimately benefit end-users by enabling powerful, tested solutions that protect current infrastructure investments.

“Having Obsidian Strategics as a strategic partner of the NETtrack program is a mutually beneficial to both companies’ goals to advance InfiniBand networking solutions,” said Joe Kimpler, director of business alliances, QLogic Corp. “We look forward to ongoing certifications, future collaboration and the opportunity to optimize the performance of InfiniBand solutions for the fast-growing HPC market.”