Can someone explain the concepts of IPoIB and TCP over infiniband? I understand the overall concept and data rates provided by native infiniband, but dont quite understand how TCP and IPoIB fit in. Why do u need them and what do they do? What is the difference when someone says their network uses native IB, IPoIB or TCP with infiniband? Which one is better? I am not from a strong networking background, so it would be nice if you could elaborate.

Thanks for your help.

IPoIB stands for Internet Protocol over InfiniBand, so IPoIB and TCP over infiniband are synonyms.

Basically, it just means they're shifting their TCP/IP workload over the infiniband fabric instead of traditional ethernet. In a large datacenter with hundreds of clustered servers interacting with each other via IP, there's a huge performance gain to be had there.

Thank you. I am still not clear as to what the difference is between IPoIB and native Infiniband? I assumed when two systems communicate with each other over infiniband, it *has* to be using IPoIB. Some folks at the data center here talk about performing tests using IPoIB and using native Infiniband. What is 'native infiniband'? How would it work w/o TCP/IP protocols?

No, infiniband communications don't have to be TCP/IP. It can be used for direct access to a SAN, just like you might have used a SCSI or fiber channel connection. And there are some big hardware solutions that are using infiniband connections under the covers. For instance, IBM uses infiniband to cluster their POWER6+ servers.

I'm not sure how you would go comparing one against the other, though, because they both have different uses... unless one were considering whether to use IPoIB as a storage access method, like an iSCSI.

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Thank you very much.