Intalio Partners With Mellanox

Intalio, Inc., ‘The Private Cloud Company’, announced a strategic partnership with Mellanox Technologies. Through this partnership, Mellanox Technologies will supply its world leading InfiniBand adapters and switches used by the Intalio|Cloud Appliance as unified networking fabric.

The Intalio|Cloud Appliance integrates in a single rack all the hardware and software required for building a true enterprise-class private cloud computing platform. The hardware is made of standard components using HP BladeSystem blade servers and enclosures, Solid State Drives (SSD) for all database storage, and the InfiniBand interconnect technology to effectively connect them all together. The Intalio|Cloud Appliance is used for powering Intalio|Cloud On-Demand and Intalio|Cloud Managed-On-Premises. With the latter option, all hardware and systems administration services are provided on-premises by Intalio, while customers only pay for a monthly user fee.

Intalio selected InfiniBand over alternative networking technologies for its record bandwidth (40Gbps), unrivaled low latency (1.2 microseconds) and kernel bypass to maximize system efficiency, application adaptability and productivity of jobs outsourced by Intalio’s customers. Using InfiniBand, the Intalio|Cloud Appliance benefits from a unified networking fabric, removing the need for deploying and managing multiple networking technologies such as Ethernet and Fibre Channel, thereby reducing networking hardware acquisition costs by up to 50% and network management costs by up to 30%, while boosting performance.

"When we designed our first cloud appliance, large bandwidth and low latency were top priorities, and for this reason InfiniBand quickly became a no-brainer," said Ismael Chang Ghalimi, CEO of Intalio. "We selected Mellanox Technologies as exclusive supplier of InfiniBand equipment for the performance and quality of their end-to-end connectivity products, their close relationship with HP, and their world-class technical support. This partnership allowed us to deliver a cutting-edge appliance in a record time, with minimum up-front investments."

InfiniBand’s high bandwidth and low latency also reduces the I/O overhead introduced by virtualization for implementing a scalable multi-tenant architecture. By offering up to 4 times as much bandwidth as 10 Gigabit Ethernet, InfiniBand dramatically reduces the performance impact of real-time Virtual Machine (VM) replication for fail-over and disaster recovery purposes. Also, thanks to its very low latency, InfiniBand makes it possible to create a unified memory space across multiple blade servers, allowing applications and databases to be scaled up without having to use dedicated SMP systems. Such architecture can reduce hardware acquisition costs by up to 75%.

“Cloud computing solutions deploy the highest performance I/O and networking solutions in order to ensure the required levels of service, efficiency and utilization,” said John Monson, vice president of marketing at Mellanox. “We are pleased to partner with Intalio and provide our end-to-end InfiniBand solutions to enable the Intalio|Cloud Appliance to provide the most productive and economical cloud infrastructure to our mutual customers.”

The Intalio|Cloud Appliance powered by Mellanox InfiniBand adapters and switches is currently used by Intalio for its On-Demand offering for customers such as Mitsubishi Corporation and Mitsui. The Intalio|Cloud Appliance Model I puts in a single rack up to 128 CPU cores, 2.3TB of memory, 24TB of SSD database storage, and 528TB of HDD file storage. The Intalio|Cloud Appliance Model II, a scaled-down version of the Model I, will be demonstrated on the Mellanox booth at VMworld in San Francisco, August 31-September 3, 2009.