Infiniband Support

[Pepo]

Is there any plans to support Infiniband in 8.1? Thanks.

 

[Widgets]

I also would like to know of any planned support for Infiniband. There seems to be alot of used/refurbished equipment on the market for very reasonable prices. Infiniband would be a great plus for a product that purports to use commodity and inexpensive equipment to achieve superior results. I am having to look at using 10GBe for a project, Infinibad could save me a considerable amount of cash. Anybody got any info.

 

[Joakim Hamilton]

iXsystems has a infiniband series spotlight with QDR: http://www.ixsystems.com/servers/ix/2u-servers/infiniband-series-spotlight.html#ix-12x4ib-ix-12x8ib

It would be great if FreeNAS also had QDR support. The new LSI 12Gb/s SAS controller would be great to put on the supported list in a near future.

 

[uutzinger]

I believe infiniband requires FreeBSD 9.0 or later which would explain why FreeNAS currently does not support inifiniband.

 

[_Adrian_]

Digging up an old thread..

Any future plans for Infiniband support ?

OFED stack has been available since BSD V4.4

 

[ZFS Noob]

Another vote for it. I'd be thrilled to be able to move from LAGG'd gigabit NICs to infiniband HBAs in my servers. It's different technology, but it looks quite a bit cheaper than 10 GigE.

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, I wouldn't expect that anytime soon. But hey, its open source. You are welcome to write it up and get it in the FreeNAS code yourself. :)

git for the win!

 

[ZFS Noob]

I haven't programmed C or C++ since 1991. You don't want to see my code. :D

 

[cyberjock]

I haven't programmed C or C++ since 1991. You don't want to see my code. :D

Hey, I'm learning C this year.. got the book and worked on it somewhat. So you don't want to see my code!

 

[dlavigne]

It won't be any time soon. While an OFED stack is available, it is incomplete and the drivers suffer from performance issues.

 

[_Adrian_]

It won't be any time soon. While an OFED stack is available, it is incomplete and the drivers suffer from performance issues.

Yes, but Average Latency would still be a lot lower than ethernet and since the OFED Stack is underlying between the hardware and software layer, so latency is still in the micro second range
Throughput will still be noticeably more even with a botched OFED stack, however that can be tuned as we go along specially if we show interest in it, it will eventually get the support it needs / deserves as noted before its A LOT cheaper than 10GBe.
Your average dual port infiniband card can be found as low as $35 on ebay, and there were a few complete setups ( switch, 24 cards and cables ) starting at $500 where you'd pay about that for a 10GBe network card alone and you still dont have a switch and still need at least another card.

I'm hopeing for the same idea to be implemented in pfSense 2.2 as its going to be based on FreeBSD10

 

[dlavigne]

You can follow this bug. ATM, adding OFED panics FreeNAS.

 

[_Adrian_]

iXsystems has a infiniband series spotlight with QDR: http://www.ixsystems.com/servers/ix/2u-servers/infiniband-series-spotlight.html#ix-12x4ib-ix-12x8ib

It would be great if FreeNAS also had QDR support. The new LSI 12Gb/s SAS controller would be great to put on the supported list in a near future.

Right now the cards that are dirt cheap are the SDR and DDR and most would settle for support on the mainstream ones ( Mellanox, TopSpin/Cisco, Voltaire )