IBM Ships the Netfinity SP Switch for Critical Application Environments
SOMERS, NY (October 14, 1999) – IBM today announced the immediate availability of the Netfinity SP Switch, a high-speed interconnect switch for server clustering.
The SP Switch enables customers to implement scalable Windows NT cluster solutions to increase availability and performance. Future implementations will include support for interoperability with RS/6000 SP servers.
Based on the successful RS/6000 technology, the SP Switch is a key component of the Netfinity ‘Cornhusker’ solution — a Windows NT based clustering solution that allows up to eight server nodes to be interconnected together. With up to 33.6Gb/s of data thruput, the SP Switch comes armed with redundant fans, power supplies, switch cards and an integrated service processor — a computer within the switch. These high availability features, have become the signature of the Netfinity product family.
“High Availability is critical for customers running enterprise e-business solutions,” said James Gargan, Director of Netfinity Product Marketing. “By leveraging our mainframe heritage into our Netfinity products, we are able to offer the highest levels of availability on the Intel platform.”
“The IBM Netfinity SP Switch was an automatic choice for us to build our business applications on, said Michael Bryson, manager of LAN support and communications at PJM. “Our members depend upon PJM to help ensure that they have the electrical power to run consumers’ homes and energize businesses operations. It is essential that the computer systems that help us plan capacity and coordinate distribution be accessable at any time, across our enterprise. The Netfinity SP Switch does just that.”
IBM Netfinity SP Switch Family
IBM Netfinity SP Switch: A High bandwidth, low latency, non-blocking switch fabric unit with up to 2.4Gb/s concurrent send and receive (per port). Other features include:
— Eight standard ports, upgradable to 14 with an optional 2nd switch card
— Redundant subsystems including fans, power supplies and optional switch cards
— Integrated service processor support with management alert notification
— Control panel user interface with alpha numeric display for switch information
IBM Netfinity SP Host Adapter: An industry standard 32-bit PCI adapter developed by the RS/6000 server group. Features include:
— An Integrated 603e Power PC processor
— A total bi-directional bandwidth of 2.4Gb/s
Current Netfinity SP Switch clustering solutions include:
— Netfinity Availability Extensions for MSCS — codenamed ‘Cornhusker’
— Netfinity Advanced Cluster Enabler for OPS
— IBM DB2 Universal Database EEE
Source: IBM