Fabric7 Systems, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, debuted its family of high-performance servers designed for fabric computing. Fabric7 has worked with AMD to develop a new approach to enterprise computing. Its servers leverage the AMD Opteron processor and extend its Direct Connect Architecture with networked I/O and application service resources into a dynamic fabric.
The architecture provides a highly scalable and hardware partitionable symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) complex that can be configured on demand into a flexible network of large or small servers each running Linux or Windows. A large number of QoS-capable Ethernet and Fibre Channel interfaces can be provisioned and bound dynamically to each server.
The company is introducing a high-end Q160 server that features 128 Gbps of non-blocking, switched I/O that provides up to 40 Gbps bandwidth to the processor and memory complex. The switched I/O can be extended across the fabric to provide 30 Gbps between chassis or across sites.
Fabric7 said that by unifying switching with processing in the system architecture it can dramatically improve server-to-server communication performance by removing the overhead and latency inherent in bus-based transactions and traversal of external interfaces. Fabric7 servers can be direct-connected to create a low-latency fabric that extends seamlessly across datacenters.
Fabric7 Systems has raised $32 million in private funding. Fabric7’s key investors include New Enterprise Associates, Goldman Sachs, Selby Venture Partners, Vanguard Ventures, Foundation Capital, Sanmina-SCI, and Yasuda Enterprise Development Co., Ltd.
http://www.fabric7.com
- Fabric7 is headed by Dr. Sharad Mehrotra, who previously was also the principal Founder, Chairman and CEO of Procket Networks, which developed a high-performance router and raised a total of $272 million in venture funding before being acquired by Cisco Systems.
- Fabric7’s engineering team also includes Nakul Saraiya (Chief Software Architect), who previously was principal engineer at Akamai Technologies; Thomas D. Lovett, who previously was chief architect at Sequent Computer System and later led the development of IBM’s 64-bit xSeries servers; and Kuldeep Sandhu, who previously was Executive Vice President of Storage Products at Xiotech Corporation.
