The last day of the conference… here are the sessions that I went to:
Session 1: Infiniband Technology Overview
Some of the things that were of interest to me in this session were things like NFSoRDMA, which could be a useful solution assuming that NFS can handle the traffic. We have seen problems with machines trying to serve out to too many hosts via NFS. The other things was iSER, which is iSCSI over infiniband using IPoIB. It is starting to gain some ground out there, though I am not exactly sure how we would put it to use. I suppose if we were to get some iSCSI targets we could serve those targets over infiniband using iSER.
One question that came up in my own mind during this was how we might be able to utilize QoS on the infiniband fabric, or even if it would be feasibly useful. It is soemthing to look at for us.
Session 2: Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE)
This was an interesting session as I didn’t know a lot about FCoE. it requires switches that support it which means added cost, and it is intended to stay within the datacenter and not go out on the WAN. This is caused by the requirement for lossless ethernet, something that it hard to do on a WAN network. Normal ethernet will be able to share these links, of course, so basically it would be double utilization of the network.
A minimum of one FCoE switch is required at the edge. Others can be used, but at least one is needed. I am wondering if this might have a use in the Tier 2 group that we have here.
Session 3: PCI Express and Storage
This was a great session. I didn’t write down very much because the slides were pretty self explanatory, but the information on those slides is incredible. Basically gen 2.0 of the PCI Express architecture is going to be twice as fast as gen 1.0, and gen 3.0 will be twice as fast as 2.0. As gen 2.0 was started to be released into the wild in the fourth quarter of 2007, I expect it is starting to make its way into the server board market now.
That was all of the sessions I went to on Thursday. After that third session, I got in the car and drove home, making a pit-stop at my mom’s house where we went and ate dinner. 🙂