Novell’s soon-to-be released Linux distribution will pack with it open source OpenIB InfiniBandsoftware, according to the OpenIB Alliance, now called The OpenFabrics Alliance. The inclusion opens up a wider availability of InfiniBand to IT professionals, increasing interoperability and support within the industry as the Alliance extends its focus on RDMA over Ethernet.
“InfiniBand’s inclusion in the Linux distributions makes its usage more attractive to IT managers,” said Jim Ryan, of Intel and chairman of the OpenFabrics Alliance, “and will continue to drive its rapid adoption in major markets such as financial services, manufacturing, oil and gas, life sciences, and all aspects research and government computing.”
The inclusion of OpenIB InfiniBand software in Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server aids in gaining control over network fabric while providing a foundation on which to deploy Xen virtualization for large multi-node clusters, according to Novell’s Jeff Hawkins.
“By increasing application throughput and allocating network bandwidth by workload, Novell and Open IB enable organizations to improve server utilization and create a flexible and responsive data center,” said Hawkins.
Founded in 2004 as the OpenIB Alliance, the OpenFabrics Alliance dedicates itself to developing “transport agnostic” open source software for RDMA fabric technologies. The primary focus is furthering the development of Linux-based InfiniBand software, recently expanding that focus to support iWARP.
The group is comprised of all-star technology vendors and end-user organizations like AMD, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Linux Networx, LSI Logic, NetEffect, Oracle, Rackable Systems, and Sun Microsystems.
With the inclusion of the OpenRDMA Project, the Alliance is working towards the goal of a single software stack for downstream Linux distributions that is transport agnostic with support for RDMA over InfiniBand and Ethernet. In addition, the expanded transport agnostic charter is intended to enable the inclusion of other RDMA fabric technologies as they come to market.
“The OpenRDMA Project is committed to offering its existing code base, along with hardware specific drivers, for joint development under an OpenFabrics stack that is accepted by kernel.org.,” said Venkata Jagana, IBM, Linux Technology Center and co-founder and leader of the OpenRDMA project. “Support for a converged software stack makes it easier and less costly for customers to run applications across different RDMA fabrics.”
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