Obsidian Strategics Longbow C and X series devices achieve IBTA and OFA interop certification

Durham, NH (January 2009) — Obsidian is pleased to announce that its Longbow C series and Longbow X series InfiniBand range extender products have successfully passed both InfiniBand Trade Association and OpenFabrics Alliance interoperability tests. The Longbow family are the only range-extenders to have been awarded compliance certification for the full set of IBTA and OFA tests, which were carried out at the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Lab at the 14th plugfest in September 2008.

Longbow C series devices seamlessly extend InfiniBand fabrics over up to 100km of light path (dark fiber or WDM lambda), while the Longbow X series are designed for use over global 10 GbEthernet or OC-192 networks. Full interoperability is critical to the Longbows, which achieve their transparency to InfiniBand infrastructure by presenting as standard InfiniBand switches.

"The UNH's well-recognized IOL labs perform systematic tests to establish compliance with the appropriate published open standard specifications, as well as rigorous cross-vendor compatibility tests in real-world network environments", said Dr. David Southwell — President of Obsidian Strategics, "As InfiniBand expands further into data centers - and using Longbow technology even interconnects remote data centers - multi-vendor networks become commonplace, highlighting the need for this kind of interoperability program".

The Compliance and Interoperability Working Group's logo program allows customers to buy certified equipment with confidence that they will plug-and-play with other equipment in the data center.

About the InfiniBand® Trade Association:
The InfiniBand Trade Association was founded in 1999 and is chartered with maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand™ specification. The IBTA is led by a distinguished steering committee that includes IBM, Intel, Mellanox, QLogic, Sun and Voltaire. Other members of the IBTA represent leading enterprise IT vendors who are actively contributing to the advancement of the InfiniBand specification. For more information, see www.infinibandta.org

About the OpenFabrics Alliance:
Founded in June 2004 as the OpenIB Alliance, the organization was originally focused on developing a standardized, Linux-based InfiniBand software stack. In 2005, the Alliance committed itself to supporting Windows, a move that would make the Alliance's software stack truly cross-platform. The vision of the OpenFabrics Alliance is to deliver a unified, cross-platform, transport-independent software stack for RDMA using InfiniBand and other technologies. For more information, see www.openfabrics.org

About Obsidian Strategics:
Obsidian Strategics™ is the developer of Longbow™, a series of InfiniBand products featuring range extension, routing and encryption. Longbow technology allows an InfiniBand fabric, normally a short-range network used in high-performance computing, to be extended via optical fiber over varying distances. Longbow connects across Campus, Metro or Global networks to offer unparalleled high-bandwidth, low-latency access to InfiniBand compute and storage resources. For more information, see www.obsidianstrategics.com