Oracle, Mellanox collaborate on high speed cloud networking standards

Oracle and Mellanox have announced a partnership to drive interoperability between their products and to jointly develop further industry standards for InfiniBand—a high speed cloud networking technology. Products supporting the InfiniBand standard provide extreme bandwidth and ultra-low latency for fast, agile, and secure cloud infrastructure, and are based upon industry standards and available from multiple vendors. The company says in a statement that Oracle and Mellanox Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) 100G InfiniBand products are engineered to the InfiniBand Architecture Specification Release 1.3 and allow customers to deploy a 100Gb/s fabric that is backwards compatible with the previous generations of InfiniBand-based systems (FDR, QDR, DDR, and SDR). Oracle says its core strategy is to enable its cloud solutions and Engineered Systems with open technologies. The company cites ‘superior performance, efficiency, and scalability’ and that InfiniBand is a dominant fabric for building supercomputers as the reason for choosing InfiniBand as the foundational technology for Engineered Systems. “With a standards-based architecture, and the most advanced roadmap that is guided by the InfiniBand Trade Association, and a mature, open source software stack, InfiniBand offers customers the best of performance and interoperability with the support of a large community of suppliers, developers, and users,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president, marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “This partnership enables us to continue to optimise and expand InfiniBand’s role as a key technology for any cloud environment.”