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What is InfiniBand?
InfiniBand (IB) is a high speed, high density serial interconnect that increases CPU utilization,
decreases latency, and eases the management pain of data centers.
The term “InfiniBand” refers to the entire hardware, communication, and management infrastructure.
Use of this technology increases the communication speed between:
•CPUs
• devices within servers
• subsystems located throughout a network.
How Does InfiniBand Work?
InfiniBand combines high-speed hardware, specialized protocols, and Remote Data Memory Access
(RDMA) techniques to achieve the objective of increased CPU utilization and decreased latency.
Operations of the InfiniBand Architecture are managed by the Subnet Manager.
Possible Components
One or more of the following hardware components may be used to maximize your server network.
• InfiniBand switch
• Host Channel Adapters (installed in host)
• Ethernet Gateway
• Fibre Channel Gateway
Protocols
InfiniBand requires a new set of protocols. For information on how to configure these protocols, refer to
the HP Dual-port 4x Fabric Adapter User Guide.
IPoIB
The IP over IB (IPoIB) link driver provides standardized Internet Protocol encapsulation over
InfiniBand fabrics. IPoIB can transparently use IP over InfiniBand technology, similar to the way that
IP runs over Ethernet.
The primary responsibilities of the IPoIB driver are to perform address resolution and the management
of multicast membership.
SDP
The Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) is a transparent protocol used on InfiniBand networks to allow
sockets-based applications to take advantage of the RDMA performance over an InfiniBand network.
SDP provides:
• a reduction in the amount of software running inside a process context
• zero copy
SDP protocol support enables databases, application servers, and CPUs to operate more efficiently
because the databases spends less time waiting for work, the application servers spend less time waiting
for responses, and the CPUs have more cycles free for other work.
SRP
SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP) is an upper-layer storage protocol for InfiniBand. It runs SCSI commands
across RDMA-capable networks for InfiniBand hosts to communicate with Fibre Channel storage
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