Infiniband/10GbE converged adapters support?
So, for a while I've been really wondering whether 10GbE or Infiniband will win the data center war. Infiniband is unquestionably the superior network technically (with sub-microsecond latencies and 40Gb/s HCAs and even some 120Gb/s connections available) and is much cheaper at the same bandwidth, but Ethernet has slain all other networks over the last three and a half decades. And then there are the "Data Center Ethernet" extensions that make 10GbE much better and also iWARP, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, and a bunch of other extensions to ethernet that are trying to narrow the vast gap between 10GbE and Infiniband. Also, I've also found it funny how most 10GbE adapters use the same connector as Infiniband. So...
I just found out about Mellanox's new ConnectX VPI (Virtual Protocol Interconnect) adapters which are flexible enough to do both, while supporting all those convergent-network ethernet extensions. On the dual port controllers, you can even have one 10GbE and one 40Gb/s Infiniband AT THE SAME TIME. You can start with 10GbE and move to 40Gb/s IB or use FCoE or even Fibre Channel over Infiniband. They're only about 25% more expensive than the regular 40Gb/s IB cards. Genius. The customer can't lose!
They use the same Open-Fabrics OFED driver matrix as is common for all mellanox IB or 10GbE adapters for linux, so I think support could be relatively simple.
So, two questions: Would this work?
When will this be supported?
