Obsidian Unveils the First Member of the Crossbow™ Family of Multi-port Native InfiniBand™ Routers

Multi-subnet capability enables unprecedented scalability and opens new application domains for InfiniBand based fabrics

Edmonton, Canada – June 10, 2014 – Obsidian is pleased to announce that it is now taking orders for the Crossbow R400-6, the first example of a new class of InfiniBand hardware capable of natively connecting up to six subnets at QDR speeds.

During its first decade, the InfiniBand industry largely confined itself to delivering high performance connectivity solutions for the HPC community - single-room, single-subnet installations lacking security mechanisms. Through its Longbow™ family of devices, Obsidian has already established InfiniBand as the preferred protocol for high performance WAN transmissions, complete with integrated wire speed cryptography. Now the Crossbow family completes this picture by adding multi-subnet routing.

The Crossbow R400-6 is a ¼ RU device consuming less than 55W equipped with six QSFP ports for QDR InfiniBand at 40Gbits/s and Gigabit Ethernet/USB (RS-232) ports for management. Each InfiniBand port can reside in a separate subnet – Crossbow provides low latency full line rate routing between subnets. In applications requiring high throughput between two subnets, a 220W 1RU Crossbow shelf delivers a full 48GBytes/s of inter-subnet bandwidth.

Crossbow may be freely deployed with other standards compliant InfiniBand equipment such as switches, HCAs or Longbow range extenders to build complex fabrics across many LAN installations connected by standard cable or global WAN links, using GID addressing.

The advent of multi-subnet InfiniBand routers – as enabled by Obsidian's enhanced subnet manager BGFC – offer significant new opportunities such as extreme node-count scaling through fault isolation and bypassing LID-space limitations, administrative domain demarcation and the simpler aggregation of local and remote compute/storage resources. These possibilities speak to both next- generation supercomputer architectures and also Internet-scale data centre fabrics.

See the Crossbow in action and meet the Obsidian team at ISC14 (Congress Center Leipzig, Germany) in booth #504 from June 23rd to 25th.

About Obsidian Strategics
Obsidian Strategics™ is the developer of Longbow™ and Crossbow™, a series of InfiniBand products featuring range extension, routing and encryption. Longbow technology allows an InfiniBand fabric - normally a short-range network used in supercomputers and data centres - to be securely extended via optical fiber over global distances. Crossbow technology provides very high performance routing of InfiniBand traffic between many separate subnets, enabling unprecedented scalability and manageability. www.obsidianstrategics.com.