Engenio Information Technologies Inc. in Milpitas, Calif., Monday announced that it's shipping the industry's first native InfiniBand-enabled storage array, with data throughput rates of 10Gbit/sec., more than twice the speed of the fastest Fibre Channel-based arrays. The Engenio 6498 controller and Engenio 6498 storage system integrate InfiniBand connectivity with the company's previous all-Fibre Channel Model 6998 array, which offers either high-performance Fibre Channel or high-capacity Serial ATA disk drives.

Engenio, a subsidiary of LSI Logic Corp., resells its products through Silicon Graphics Inc. SGI has taken Engenio's back-end InfiniBand and created an end-to-end server-to-storage InfiniBand fabric using controller nodes from YottaYotta Inc. in Edmonton, Alberta. The SGI InfiniteStorage TP9700 array is available with configurations priced starting at US$103,550.

Also Monday, Isilon Systems Inc. in Seattle unwrapped a new network-attached storage cluster that uses InfiniBand as a backbone to scale its system up to 250TB of capacity under a single file system. The Isilon IQ 6000i system is built on rack-mountable 6TB nodes, which are each 2U high.

Parag Mallick, director of clinical proteomics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, is using 10 Isilon IQ 6000is as back-end storage for three mass spectrometer machines that analyze blood proteins for a cancer research project. The laboratory's spectrometers generate about 1TB of data per day.

'We had a fairly massive scalability problem. So the idea of taking a device off-line [to add storage capacity to it] was unthinkable,' Mallick said.