Longbow E-Series devices allow arbitrarily distant InfiniBand fabrics to communicate at full bandwidth through 10Gbits/s Wide Area Networks. The WAN connection is managed out of band, and except for flight time induced latency is transparent to the InfiniBand hardware, stacks, operating systems and applications.
Longbow E-Series devices achieve flow control by shaping WAN traffic and managing buffer credits to ensure extremely high efficiency bulk data transfers — including RDMAs — making the system a highly effective transport mechanism for very large data sets between geographically separated InfiniBand equipment.
In switch mode, Longbow E-Series devices look like a 2-port switch to the InfiniBand subnet manager. A point-to-point WAN link presents as a pair of serially connected 2-port InfiniBand switches spanning the conventional InfiniBand fabrics at each site. A single subnet spans the Wide Area Network connection, unifying what were separate subnets at each site.
Longbow E-Series devices also provide an InfiniBand router mode — improving global system manageability, scalability and robustness. In this mode, each site remain separate subnets, with independent subnet managers, easing possible security and performance concerns associated with remote subnet management. 4x SDR InfiniBand provides just 8Gbits/s of data payload bandwidth; two totally independent Gigabit Ethernet links are also encapsulated across the WAN link to make full use of the extra bandwidth.
Longbow E100 devices communicate over 10Gb Ethernet, as well as dark fiber applications. In addition to the range-extension and routing capabilities, Longbow E-Series features full-speed integrated AES-192-GCM encryption and authentication.
