The concept of consolidation is simple but the commensurate benefits to the end user are considerable -- in administration, vendor neutrality, power budget and flexibility, all leading to a lowering of cost and reducing risk for IT departments and cloud providers.

A "maverick fabric" architecture preserves single-switch performance characteristics and throughput by instantiating a common fabric between individual switches connected in an arbitrary topology. A fabric is maintained throughout the distributed switch deployment comprising, in theory, an infinite number of ports. It also supports multi-path, loop-free routing techniques that combine to provide distributed load-balancing across multi-chassis configurations, effectively removing network congestion while maintaining strict in-sequence parity for reliable and efficient packet delivery.

Embracing the "maverick fabric" concept to achieve optimization of a network free from congestion offers considerable advantages to the delivery of HPC-quality services. Avoiding gateways between one fabric from another provides a unique opportunity to move storage from islands of information per cluster to a more distributed enterprise, thus allowing HPC concepts to take more of a profitable role in the IT infrastructure of a large-scale business.

The Gnodal ASIC-based Ethernet switch architecture features a congestion-aware performance and workload engine that allows for ultra-low latency transmission while utilizing a dynamic, fully adaptive load-balancing mechanism to equitably arbitrate a pre-emptive pathway for large data-sets, high computational applications and massive storage demands prevalent in HPC, Cloud and Big Data environments, thus utilizing virtually 100% of the Gnodal fabric's available bandwidth. For more information, visit www.gnodal.com.

in Network World's Data Center section.