For high-speed interconnect in clustered host environments, which technology is commonly chosen?

For high-speed interconnect in clustered host environments, which technology is commonly chosen?

• A. Infiniband
• B. 1Gb Ethernet
• C. 10Gb Ethernet
• D. Fibre Channel

Answer: (D)

The key idea is that clustered hosts often need a dedicated, highly reliable path to shared storage. Fibre Channel provides a specialized storage-area network (SAN) fabric that delivers high throughput with very low, predictable latency and supports features like multipath I/O and zoning. This makes storage access deterministic and scalable, which is essential for clusters that rely on shared disks or arrays for their workloads. In contrast, general-purpose Ethernet options (1Gb or even 10Gb) can carry storage traffic but aren’t as consistently deterministic as a purpose-built SAN fabric, and InfiniBand is typically favored for compute-focused interconnects in HPC rather than for traditional clustered storage access.

The key idea is that clustered hosts often need a dedicated, highly reliable path to shared storage. Fibre Channel provides a specialized storage-area network (SAN) fabric that delivers high throughput with very low, predictable latency and supports features like multipath I/O and zoning. This makes storage access deterministic and scalable, which is essential for clusters that rely on shared disks or arrays for their workloads. In contrast, general-purpose Ethernet options (1Gb or even 10Gb) can carry storage traffic but aren’t as consistently deterministic as a purpose-built SAN fabric, and InfiniBand is typically favored for compute-focused interconnects in HPC rather than for traditional clustered storage access.