IBM company SoftLayer will offer the option to provide InfiniBand networking technology to connect SoftLayer bare metal servers. This option will increase accessibility to high performance computing as part of technical computing and enable companies to move HPC-level workloads to the cloud.
InfiniBand provides transfer speeds of up to 56Gbps between transfer nodes and tends to be more reliable and serviceable than legacy PCI bus or I/O solutions. It will also reduce latency between bare metal servers, allowing more efficient and effective management of massive amounts of data.
“As more and more companies migrate their toughest workloads to the cloud, they’re now demanding that vendors provide high speed networking performance to keep up,” said SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby. “Our InfiniBand support is helping to push the technological envelope while redefining how cloud computing can be used to solve complex business issues.”
InfiniBand is expected to be available on SoftLayer in the third quarter of 2014.