… Obsidian Welcomes MetroX

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd.‘s announcement at the Supercomputing 2012 event of a soon to be released product capable of extending 10Gbits/s IB fabrics over as much as 10km has been welcomed by Obsidian Strategics, Inc.

The importance of range-extension for the high performance but intrinsically short-reach IB protocol is not lost on Obsidian, which first demonstrated the capability with its Longbow products at the same Supercomputing conference seven years earlier in Seattle.

Obsidian’s chief visionary officer, Dr. David Southwell recalls: "In 2005, Obsidian demonstrated three wide area IB links encapsulated inside standard SONET and ATM WAN protocols, connecting the show’s internal super network – SCInet – to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (1,300km), Intel’s HPC facility in Dupont, WA (100km) and a cross country path to the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. While the 5,000km link to NRL was by far the longest IB link demonstrated at that time, it was the relatively short 100km run to Intel’s Dupont facility that possibly did more to raise the awareness of the potential for long haul IB. Then Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, using partners Intel, Cisco and Obsidian, wa able to make use of the high performance link during his key note address to migrate a large HPC data set to an Intel supercomputer in Dupont, allowing the results to rapidly migrate back in real time during his talk – actually an early demonstration of HPC cloud before the term had been coined."

Southwell continued: "While Obsidian’s team of experts have gone on to develop a suite of capability sets including native IB routing, encryption/authentication, long-distance standards-based WDM devices, file migration software, diagnostic tools and more recently in collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and NASA Ames Research Center subnet management for compound topologies, we remain very passionate about long haul IB. We understand the demands of spanning HPC LAN and optical WAN domains in a single device, of rigorous standards compliance and carrier grade reliability. As Mellanox attempts to expand their sphere of expertise starting with stretched LANs of up to 10km with a view to stepping up to the full gambit of optical capability in the future, we wish them every success in our marketplace."

"I can recall when Dr. Southwell and I met with Eyal several years ago to discuss incorporating long haul IB in their SDR switch," remarked Bill Halina, Obsidian’s chairman, "in the fast paced technology world it’s truly inspiring to see vision turn into reality and ultimately find its way into everyone’s home."