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Cisco Infiniband Switches Anchor High-Speed Networks at Major Customer Sites
Online Retailer Cabelas, Andrews Space and Harvard University Rely on Cisco InfiniBand Switches to Provide Optimal Bandwidth for Transaction Processing and Scientific Analysis
| Source: Cisco Systems, Inc.
RENO, NV--(Marketwire - November 13, 2007) - SC07 International Conference -- Cisco®
(NASDAQ : CSCO ) today announced that Cisco's high-performance Server Fabric
Switch (SFS) InfiniBand Series has been deployed to support advanced
high-speed data online transactions at Cabelas, a leading retailer of
outdoor merchandise, as well as scientific analysis and research at Andrews
Space, a developer of advanced space technologies, and at Harvard
University's Department of Chemistry.
The Cisco family of high-performance server switches offers best-in-class
scalability, high availability and security, with a common set of
management tools such as configuration interfaces and virtualization
provisioning. Supporting some of the world's largest server clusters,
Cisco SFS InfiniBand Series products offer cost-effective, low-latency
options for high-performance, computation-intensive applications where
every microsecond of latency improvement is critical.
Enabling High-Speed Holiday Online Shopping at Cabelas
Cabelas (http://www.cabelas.com), headquartered in Sidney, Neb., is the
world's largest direct marketer, and a leading specialty retailer, of
hunting, fishing, camping and related outdoor merchandise. To gear up for
the high-demand online holiday shopping season, the information technology
(IT) staff researched high-speed networking solutions to upgrade from
1-gigabit performance and replace the aging network infrastructure. IT
team members determined that they needed a three-year solution that would
anticipate future needs and support ongoing network traffic demands, as
well as provide optimal solution price to performance.
The Cabelas IT team selected the Cisco SFS 7000 Series InfiniBand solution
to deliver cost-competitive bandwidth, low latency, and high-performance
capabilities, and installed the solution in just three months over the
summer, to be ready for the start of holiday shopping in October. "We
determined that we needed a solution that could accommodate 30,000
transactions per minute going forward, and the InfiniBand solution we've
deployed delivers 70,000 transactions per minute in our in-house tests, at
half the cost of other technologies," said Luc Suryo, senior UNIX engineer
at Cabelas. "The new system helps to create a positive online user
shopping experience, which is critical because shoppers will abandon online
orders if processing isn't handled quickly."
The Cisco InfiniBand switches are located in three data centers across the
United States, and data is mirrored to a disaster recovery site that is
able to begin backup data transactions in minutes, in the event of failure
at the primary site. The IT staff also benefits from the low-latency
fabric, which allows for easy management of large volume and bursts of
traffic on the site.
"We are a pioneer in the use of InfiniBand technology in the retail market
and can confirm that the technology delivers what it promises," said Suryo.
"In our view, InfiniBand offers the most cost-effective high-speed
bandwidth on the market today and is an ideal fit for our applications."
Greater Computational Horsepower at Andrews Space
Seattle-based Andrews Space is an integrator of aerospace systems and a
developer of advanced space technologies. The company was founded in 1999
to provide a catalyst for the commercialization and development of space.
After researching processors and interconnect technology to service client
contracts, Andrews Space elected to create a new parallel-processing
computing cluster by linking Dell servers through a Cisco SFS 7000P Series
InfiniBand solution. Each Dell system contains four 3.73 gigahertz 5080
Intel® Xeon® processor cores, creating the equivalent of a 40-computer
cluster. The Cisco SFS 7000P InfiniBand Series interconnects the discrete
server resources to create a high-performance, low-latency fabric. The
switch contains ten 10-Gbps InfiniBand host channel adapters (HCAs).
According to Andrews Space, processor-to-processor latency is approximately
four microseconds and the switch latency is just 200 nanoseconds.
With the new Dell computers and the Cisco SFS 7000P InfiniBand solution,
processor utilization improved from approximately 20 percent on the old
cluster to more than 90 percent.
"For our computational fluid dynamics application, this solution is cheaper
than a supercomputer and much faster than our previous cluster," said Eli
Rosenberg, an engineer at Andrews Space. "The Cisco switch lets us perform
a whole new level of analysis, which brings in business because there are
very few firms our size with this kind of computational horsepower."
Enabling Computational Chemistry Analysis at Harvard University
Harvard's Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department is the center of
research for chemistry and chemical biology in the university's Faculty of
Arts and Sciences, and has an extensive, high performance computing (HPC)
infrastructure to support teaching and research. To host computational
chemistry applications, a new cluster was built around a unified HPC fabric
with Cisco Catalyst Series Ethernet switches, Cisco SFS 3012 InfiniBand
Series and Cisco MDS 9000 multilayer storage networking switches to support
cluster computing, shared storage, and highly available data access to
support chemistry research.
According to Dr. Gerald Lotto, assistant director of information technology
for the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and manager for the
project at Harvard, the new infrastructure is suited to the computational
workload demands of the department, and the bandwidth and capacity
challenges previously experienced have been virtually nonexistent since the
system upgrade. Lotto researched and tested high-performance shared-disk
file-system designs that took advantage of InfiniBand technology with Cisco
and IBM engineers, and found cluster performance to be as much as 50
percent faster than a Fibre Channel architecture.
For more information on Cisco HPC:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6418/index.html.
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