OpenIB InfiniBand Software Included in Leading Enterprise Linux Distributions; OpenIB Expands Mission to Develop Transport Agnostic Software for RDMA Fabrics and Changes Name to OpenFabrics Alliance

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–March 6, 2006–The OpenIB Alliance today announced that the open source OpenIB software will be included and supported in Novell’s upcoming Linux distribution release. The inclusion makes InfiniBand widely available to the IT community and provides added assurance that the technology is robust, interoperable, and strongly supported by the industry. While previously limited to InfiniBand, the Alliance announced an expanded mission to address RDMA over Ethernet, and announced a new name, The OpenFabrics Alliance.

“We are extremely pleased to tell the world that the OpenIB Alliance has achieved a major goal — the inclusion of the software stack in Novell’s Linux distribution, as well as support from other leading Linux distributors,” said Jim Ryan, of Intel and chairman of the OpenFabrics Alliance, formerly the OpenIB Alliance. “The continued market-wide adoption of InfiniBand and the will open source community customers were key drivers for reaching this milestone. InfiniBand’s inclusion in the Linux distributions makes its usage more attractive to IT managers and will continue to drive its rapid adoption in major markets such as financial services, manufacturing, oil and gas, life sciences, and all aspects research and government computing.”

“We are extremely pleased to tell the world that the OpenIB Alliance has achieved a major goal — the inclusion of the software stack in Novell’s Linux distribution, as well as support from other leading Linux distributors”

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“With the inclusion of OpenIB InfiniBand software in Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, customers gain better control over their network fabric and a strong foundation on which to deploy Xen virtualization for large multi-node clusters,” said Jeff Hawkins, Vice President of Product Management at Novell. “By increasing application throughput and allocating network bandwidth by workload, Novell and Open IB enable organizations to improve server utilization and create a flexible and responsive data center.”

The OpenIB Alliance expands mission and changes name to OpenFabrics Alliance

The OpenIB Alliance announced today that it is expanding its mission to develop transport agnostic programming interfaces for multiple RDMA capable fabrics and has changed its name to the OpenFabrics Alliance to reflect its expanded charter. With the inclusion of the OpenRDMA Project, the Alliance is working towards the goal of a single software stack for downstream Linux distributions that is transport agnostic with support for RDMA over InfiniBand and Ethernet. In addition, the expanded transport agnostic charter is intended to enable the inclusion of other RDMA fabric technologies as they come to market.

“Our ability to offer software development support for both RDMA over InfiniBand and Ethernet means that IT managers can deploy fabric solutions with confidence in the long term reliability and availability of these interfaces,” said Ryan. “In addition to furthering InfiniBand software stack development for Linux and Windows, the OpenFabrics Alliance is dedicated to supporting iWARP and OpenRDMA to refine the kernel and user level components necessary to leverage the benefits of RDMA architectures for the open source communities of developers, vendors and customers.”

By merging InfiniBand and iWARP into a single full-featured, robust and reliable open source software stack, the industry will have a set of universal application programming interfaces optimized to utilize high performance and low latency fabrics across a broad range of available platforms.

“The OpenRDMA Project is committed to offering its existing code base, along with hardware specific drivers, for joint development under an OpenFabrics stack that is accepted by kernel.org.,” said Venkata Jagana, IBM, Linux Technology Center and co-founder and leader of the OpenRDMA project. “Support for a converged software stack makes it easier and less costly for customers to run applications across different RDMA fabrics.”

“We anticipate great benefits for our applications by allowing them to be transport agnostic,” said Peter Krey, CBB Grid Research & Engineering, JP Morgan. “Moreover, the availability of a robust and widely supported open source stack that is transport agnostic for RDMA fabrics and is available through Linux distributions greatly simplifies deployment in the data center.”

About OpenFabrics Alliance

The OpenFabrics Alliance develops transport agnostic open source software for RDMA fabric technologies. Founded in June 2004 as the OpenIB Alliance to develop a Linux-based InfiniBand software stack, the organization has expanded its charter to support iWARP (RDMA over Ethernet). The OpenFabrics Alliance provides tools, communications and resources for vendors and developers to create, refine and publish standard open source software stacks for RDMA capable data center fabrics. It is comprised of technology vendors and end-user organizations including: AMD, Appro, Cisco, DataDirect Networks, Dell, Intel, Linux Networx, LSI Logic, Mellanox Technologies, Network Appliance, NetEffect, Oracle, PathScale, Rackable Systems, Silicon Graphics Inc., SilverStorm Technologies, System Fabric Works, Sun Microsystems, Tyan, Veritas, Voltaire and the following research members: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. More information about the OpenFabrics Alliance is available at https://www.openfabrics.org.