Oracle and Mellanox have formed a partnership targeted at driving interoperability between their products, and to also jointly developing industry standards for InfiniBand, a high speed cloud networking technology. Mellanox is a supplier of end-to-end connectivity solutions for servers and storage systems.
According to the vendors, products supporting the InfiniBand standard provide extreme bandwidth and ultra-low latency, are based upon industry standards, and available from multiple vendors.
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), enabling customers to protect their investments in InfiniBand-enabled applications.
Oracle says its aim is to enable its cloud solutions and engineered systems with open technologies that deliver the high performance, efficiency, and security. Oracle has chosen InfiniBand as the foundational technology for engineered systems to provide the performance and scale required for its suite of business critical applications.
“Customers using InfiniBand as the interconnect for clouds and high performance computing can be certain that as new speeds and features are incorporated into the InfiniBand architecture that they will be able to continue to work with the supplier of their choice and that new products will seamlessly integrate with their existing InfiniBand infrastructures,” said Raju Penumatcha, senior vice president, Netra and Networking, Oracle. “This continued partnership represents an enduring commitment to provide customers with the technologies and standards needed for true enterprise-class cloud infrastructures that enable them to accelerate application performance and quickly respond to changing business needs.”
In October 2010, following the acquisition of Sun in 2009, Oracle announced it had made a strategic investment in Mellanox Technologies, Ltd.
At the time, the companies stated that they had had a long-term strategic partnership that allows Oracle to leverage Mellanox's InfiniBand products to create differentiated Oracle solutions like Exadata and Exalogic.
Oracle acquired 10.2% of Mellanox’s ordinary shares in the open market, which it said was in recognition of the importance of InfiniBand and Mellanox to Oracle, and for investment purposes only, to solidify common interest in the future of InfiniBand.
For more information, go to www.oracle.com/goto/InfiniBand and www.mellanox.com.