Releases

posted on 12 March 2008 08:46

Santa Clara, California -- March 11, 2008 -- The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA), an organization committed to the development and adoption of an open-source, transport-independent software stack for high-performance computing and enterprise data centers, today announced the availability of OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) version 1.3 with new features to help IT professionals improve the efficiency and performance of their server and storage networks.

“The OpenFabrics Alliance was established to fill a need in the marketplace for a vendor-neutral software stack that could support high-performance technologies,” said Jim Ryan, chairman of the OpenFabrics Alliance. “With the release of OFED 1.3, we are realizing that goal. OFED 1.3 is enterprise-class software that offers superior performance, manageability and scalability. We are helping IT professionals eliminate obstacles to the adoption of InfiniBand and iWARP solutions that can take data center performance to new heights.”

The extensive list of new features in OFED 1.3 includes:

 Tighter integration and ease of installation with Linux offerings from Oracle, Red Hat and Novell to simplify and accelerate the deployment of InfiniBand and iWARP solutions
 Quality of Service (QoS) management capabilities that enable unified LAN, IPC and SAN applications over the same wire
 New routing algorithms to help optimize network and system performance and scalability
 Improved upper layer protocols for superior IP and sockets-based application performance, including database applications
 Enhancements that enable MPI and parallel-processing applications to scale efficiently to large numbers of nodes while reducing the memory footprint required on servers
 Enhanced diagnostic tools to improve availability
 Support for additional Independent Hardware Vendor (IHV) solutions as well as expanded interoperability with OEM solutions, including network and storage equipment,
to provide enterprise IT departments with more flexibility
 SRP (i.e., SCSI RDMA protocol) target software, enabling easier OEM and OSV adoption and faster time to market, and helping to proliferate native InfiniBand-attached
storage solutions

“Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Real Application Clusters delivers industry-leading database scalability and availability using server grids on high-performance, consolidated IO fabrics like InfiniBand,” said Juan Loaiza, senior vice president, Systems Technology, Oracle. “OFED 1.3 includes the Reliable Datagram Service (RDS) protocol, which enhances Oracle’s grid technology by providing a very high-performance protocol for inter-node communication. We are looking forward to OFED 1.3 and RDS becoming widely deployed within our customer base.”

Anyone interested in downloading OFED 1.3 at no cost may do so at http://www.openfabrics.org/builds/ofed-1.3/release/OFED-1.3.tgz. 


OFED 1.3 will be a prominent topic at OFA’s annual International Sonoma Workshop, which will be held April 6-9 at The Lodge at Sonoma. To kickoff the event, Andy Bechtolsheim will be giving a special presentation on April 6 at 7:30 p.m. The Alliance will host an open bar following Andy’s presentation. Sponsors of the International Sonoma Workshop include AMD, Chelsio Communications, DataDirect Networks, HP, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, NetEffect, QLogic and Voltaire.

This year’s workshop will examine challenges facing organizations in major vertical markets, such as automotive, biomedical, defense, financial services, media, and oil & gas. Presentations will focus on how the OFA is helping them address pain points in enterprise data centers and high-performance computing environments. The workshop also provides the OFA community with an opportunity to hear from server and storage OEMs, distributors of major operating systems, and leading ISVs about their current and future support plans for the OpenFabrics software stack as well as their requirements for the software stack moving forward.

To register for the workshop and book a hotel room, visit http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaID=149831.

Membership in OFA is not necessary.

About OpenFabrics Alliance
Founded in 2004, the charter of the OFA is to develop and evangelize a unified, transportindependent, open-source software stack for RDMA-capable fabrics, including InfiniBand and iWARP. The software stack includes RDMA-capable upper-layer protocols that are used in Linux and Windows operating-system environments. In addition, OFA manages interoperability testing of the software stack across different vendor platforms and product types. OFA is comprised of software and hardware technology vendors, system integrators and end-user organizations. For more information about the Alliance, visit www.OpenFabrics.org.

[Majid Soltani, staff writer.]