The InfiniBand Trade Association, a global organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand specification, announced that Microsoft joined the organization at the Steering Committee level. As an IBTA member, Microsoft joins forces with other leading high performance computing and enterprise IT vendors as they continue to drive the advancement of InfiniBand, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) standards.
IBTA’s focus on furthering RDMA and RoCE standards is becoming more critical as data usage continues to increase and emerging technologies continue to evolve. RDMA technology is quickly growing and expanding into mainstream data center, Web 2.0 and cloud computing markets as applications become more data intensive and demand more efficient computing and storage. Its low latency and high bandwidth allows for faster data transfer at lower cost and power usage, providing efficient, scalable, high speed networking.
“Microsoft’s membership comes at an ideal time as mainstream data centers continue to adopt advanced technologies previously only deployed in high-performance computing applications,” said Mark Atkins, chairman, IBTA Steering Committee. “As a member of the Steering Committee, Microsoft will bring a strong enterprise data center perspective to the organization as well as viewpoints on deployments of RDMA at scale for storage and cloud applications.”
“Increasing numbers of server CPUs sharing a network link, coupled with ever-increasing workload virtualization, are making unprecedented demands on modern datacenter networks. RDMA networking is a key part of the solution,” said Yousef Khalidi, distinguished engineer, Windows Azure, Microsoft. “As an active member of the IBTA, Microsoft will help promote RDMA and further drive specifications and standards to enable performance gains and reduce networking overhead on the CPUs in large, mainstream data centers.”
IBTA members are currently focused on maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand architecture definition, including RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) software architectures, InfiniBand, up to 56Gb/s and 168Gb/s per port, and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE). The organization is responsible for compliance and interoperability testing of commercial products, as well as promoting RDMA technologies.
