Emulex Joins InfiniBand Trade Association

Emulex Corporation has joined the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), an organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the IB specification.

Emulex is a voting member of the steering committee, with a charter to help define the standard and promote the benefits of RDMA technology, which is the underlying technology for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE). RoCE enables better application performance and lower TCO by improving the communication efficiency and resource utilization of the computing infrastructure in data centers.

RoCE is a standard released by the IBTA standardization body to define a new RDMA protocol over Ethernet. With the emergence of lossless Ethernet, RoCE uses IB’s efficient transport to provide the platform for deploying RDMA technology in mainstream data centers over 10/40GbE and beyond.

“As part of the IBTA, we look forward to participating in the technical and marketing working groups to promote and evangelize the broad benefits of RDMA to reduce CPU overhead, lower latency and increase bandwidth efficiency for many critical applications in the enterprise, telecommunications and cloud markets,” said Shaun Walsh, SVP marketing and corporate development, Emulex. “In addition, RDMA is a highly complementary technology for major industry trends, such as software defined networking (SDN) deployments, cloud, big data and virtualization of networking infrastructure.”

“RDMA is the I/O foundation for the world’s more powerful and efficient supercomputers and enterprise data centers,” said Bill Lee, chair of the IBTA marketing working group. “Emulex is a recognized network equipment supplier committed to improving data center performance and we welcome their contributions to the development and promotion of the IB architecture and ecosystem.”

The IBTA was founded in 1999 and is led by a steering committee and members representing enterprise IT vendors who are contributing to the advancement of the IB specification.