Mellanox InfiniBand Selected by Australian Cloud Service Provider for Use in Its Public and Private Sector

Mellanox Technologies announced on Monday that OrionVM, an Australian-based cloud service provider, would use Mellanox InfiniBand solutions in its private and public sector clouds. A supplier of server and storage services, InfiniBand and Ethernet Interconnect solutions, Mellanox offers a combination of software and hardware products designed for enterprise networks.

The benefits of InfiniBand can be huge to organizations. It lowers the cost of storage, making it affordable for organizations to store more detailed data for longer periods of time. The security of InfiniBand switches is such that they cannot be configured from a compromised node on a network, even if the network is insecure. Because the switch ports are not addressable, many attacks are not possible with InfiniBand. A SYN flood denial-of-service attack fails because the syn-flood packets are ignored.

OrionVM’s customers include several agencies within the New South Wales government, Australian Network Company AAPT, D-Link, web accounting company Saasu and Getflight, which tracks airfares of Australian airline companies in real-time. Mellanox Infiniband allowed OrionVM to offer a better performing cloud at less cost by reducing deployment costs and simplifying the architecture of their data centers.

One of OrionVM’s customers in particular, Collusion, relies heavily on cloud technology and stands out in its development of the Collusion app for the iPad. The technology not only allows the device to be used like a paper notepad, but also makes real-time collaboration between users over long distances possible.

Mellanox’ InfiniBand technology is just one component of the growing cloud computing industry and another reminder that companies resisting this technology may find themselves playing catch-up or worse yet, finding that their competitors have passed them by. Its higher performance, lower costs, scalability and the shift of hardware implementation away from IT departments to the service provider are too compelling to ignore.