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Re:Future of Cloud Storage: An inside perspective from an Ia... by lsc on Tuesday November 23, 2010 @12:15AM (#1932625)
I'm very interested in how infiniband works out for you. I've considered it myself, as used infiniband switches are available for the same price as used 1g ethernet... but while I'm pretty comfortable with fixing ethernet when it breaks... I'd be much less confident in my ability to fix infiniband by swapping out hardware than I would be in my ability to fix gigabit ethernet. As far as I can tell, infiniband is something of a dying technology vs. ethernet, market wise.

On the other hand, infiniband is fucking awesome. DMA over the network, anyone?

Re:Future of Cloud Storage: An inside perspective from an Ia... by cloudsigma on Tuesday November 23, 2010 @09:07AM (#1933673)
Yes and no. The main issue we see with 10Gbps is networking topology. We don't want to roll out a star type networking which has a big single point of failure. The whole point of moving to distributed block storage is to eliminate this. Its difficult to build a grid layout with 10Gbps without going into silly money. With Infiniband it supports very well in grid configuration which is ideal for a distributed storage network. As a technology it has at least a few years left simply because it can offer 40Gbps and Ethernet won't be there at a reasonable cost for a while.