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Do Sun Infiniband adapters have Windows drivers? (Specifically Win10). And for that matter which infiniband adapter manufacturers provide win drivers? I would appreciate any help

I have a long series of questions that could be answered in a whole LinusTechTips episode: What is the purpose of Fibre Channel HBAs? Now you have generation 5 and generation 6 HBAs with speeds of 8/16/32 Gb/s transfer speeds using optical fiber for communication rather than copper wire. What is the purpose of FC today? They are marketed as for use with hard drives, but I see no INTERNAL connectors on them that would be suited for internal hard drives such as SAS or SATA connectors. So what is the purpose of them then? It looks like they are made for external communication only. But why use FC, why not use Ethernet, you have 1GbE, 10GbE, 40GbE, ... speeds for any taste and preference? Both wired and optical. So why would one use FC instead of high speed Ethernet? To be more frank, what protocols and drivers are involved with FC? Do you use TCP/IP or what is involved? When using the controller, will it just show other devices connected to it as PCI devices, or SCSI/SATA devices or what? Will it act as a hard drive controller or an Ethernet controller? What is the target hardware used for it, some special devices with FC, another computer with an FC HBA or a FC switch? If I were to build a Beowulf cluster spanning multiple computers, what would be the best way of implementing the usage of FC connections to connect the nodes in such a cluster? Are there any substantial benefits of using that instead of regular Ethernet? To tell the truth, why am I using all these four (five if we account for SATA) interfaces interchangeably? Is it expected to see these interfaces merge into one some day in the future? I guess then we should throw Thunderbolt into the mix and while we're at it why not HDMI and DP or ..... USB3?!? Even more confusing will it get when you have FibreChannel over Ethernet (FCoE)!!! Source information comes from Broadcom/LSI, Mellanox, etc... Glossary: HBA = Host Bus Adapter (used in distinction with "I/O controller" where the I/O controller mostly means the chip that handles the interface whereas an HBA is a complete solution involving the I/O chip, PCIe connector and other I/O connectors, i.e. a controller card). FC = Fibre Channel

Hello people of LinusTechTips forums.. I have a project i am working on currently and would like assistance with one 'small' thing. My objective is to have a 20Gb/sec link between each of my servers and my pc. I have just purchased an apple xserve and have an old pc to turn into an archive server. What i would like to know is if anyone has experience setting up infiniband on mac os, and if i should change to ubuntu server or whatever. I have little experience with enterprise networking but feel confident about setting my servers up and running them.

Server Hp xw8600 2x x5430 Xeon 28GB ddr2 ECC ram Dual port 10Gbe network card LSI 16e 6gpbs SAS/Sata card (HBA) Nvidia 710GT (Basically headless server) Boot Drive WD 250GB SSD Storage Drives 7x 4TB Drive WD/HGST in raidz2 (estimated transfer speed 380MB/s) (Looking to add 13x more drives in a full rack mount case which will make estimated write of 1.0GB/s) I want to explore Infiniband 40Gbps but know the limits are in my storage drives. I like getting second hand equipment so all new SSD array is not an option. Yes Yes I know why do you need to go that fast? Because it is fun. How do you break the HDD bottlenecks.

As I regulary watch LinusTechtips on youtube I stumbled across a video called: 10x Your Network Speed.. On a Budget! I thought that is still too slow. So I googled about alternate technology and found that infiniband can also do normal IP networking. So I bought two Infiniband adapters with 40Gbit network speed each and a 7 Meter QSFP cable. All in all less than 100 Dollars. something like this: http://www.ebay.at/itm/Mellanox-ConnectX-2-VPI-Network-Adaptor-PCIe-Server-Card-/331765696568 I really find the technology fascinating as normal 40GbE Adapters are VERY expensive and I never heard of infiniband before. I bought two cards and they show up with 32Gbit. File sharing speed is at about 5 Gbytes/s (not Gigabit)! I cant find anything wrong with this solution. It works, is cheap and behaves like any other NIC (because of IP over Infiniband) So normal SMB and other network stuff works as usual. So my question is if any of you has also tried this and if someone on this channel could take a look it this to point out the possible drawbacks. (Maybe Youtube? :D)

An Introduction to Storage Networking SAN, NAS, networking, oh my! I see lots of talk about NAS setups in the storage section. Much of it revolves around increasing storage performance through caching and complex RAID arrays, but there's less discussion about the networks they're connected to. If your storage is high-performance, then your network is usually the next bottleneck in the system, especially when multiple users are connected to a NAS. There are a couple of concepts that I'll mention, starting with the idea of a Storage Area Network: A SAN is a network which provides access to storage. Traditional implementations in the enterprise environment will use a dedicated network, and the storage is consolidated into a SAN appliance. Depending on the implementation, a SAN might be sharing individual hard drives, or volumes spread across multiple hard drives. The network also doesn't matter, but requires hardware and software support. Two of the more common ones are Fibre Channel and iSCSI. Fibre Channel uses fibre cables which provide lower latency than iSCSI, which is typically run over copper cabling using SFP+ or RJ45 connectors. In addition, data is transferred in block form, rather than in file form, and the storage devices appear as local devices. Can you tell which of these are physical hard drives and which ones are SAN storage? [spoiler=Answer] Here, the Media drive and the VRAID drive are iSCSI targets. These ones are coming from two separate SAN appliances in our lab. This allows for all sorts of neat functionality. Firstly, it allows you to perform Windows Backups to the machine over a network without owning Windows 7 Professional. It also allows you to install programs to remote storage. That remote device, if it's a part of a RAID-protected volume, will be much safer than a single hard drive. Also, since the data is stored in block form, you can format an iSCSI target with whatever format your file system can support. Next is networking protocols. I won't talk about Fibre Channel since setting up an infrastructure is very expensive and specialized, and really only useful for the enterprise environment. However, I will discuss iSCSI, which has risen in popularity over the years and is usable in consumer environments. SCSI is an interface that allows one to directly attach storage appliances to servers, where they appear like local storage. iSCSI takes it one step further, making the protocol talk over a network rather than through a dedicated cable. You can use iSCSI on almost any computer in existence. If you're running Windows 2000 or later, your OS comes with an iSCSI initiator by default. Linux has an iSCSI driver, FreeBSD has iscontrol, and you can get one for OS X (doesn't come with one by default). 4) Another issue with having data served over iSCSI is that, should someone else do something intensive, your performance can also be affected. If your parents start doing a backup to the SAN, then you will be affected, which is annoying when trying to play a game. This could manifest as long loading times, or you could lag in-game because your program needed to access files on your storage. Either way, it's an inconvenience to you. Solution: This is the most common problem with iSCSI, and the solution is to have this type of traffic routed over a dedicated network so that when your parents go to back up their computer, it will be over a different network connection, and you won't have as many issues. If your storage isn't adequate, you can still be affected. This feature isn't really doable with a prebuilt system, but most enterprise environments will use equipment that can do it. You can also build one yourself, using multiple network cards to split traffic between a public network and your SAN network. Now let's talk about NAS. A NAS is similar to appliances connected to a SAN, but instead of appearing as a local device it appears as a networked device. It's what you see when you map a network drive in Windows. The advantage of this is that a data store can be shared with multiple users, rather than. In addition, they're usually attached to an existing network of computers (sometimes called the 'client' network), rather than on a separate network.