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The Topspin 270 is the industry's only highly reliable infiniband switch designed to deploy clusters in mission-critical environments.

Introducing The Topspin 270
The Topspin 270 provides the industry's only InfiniBand switch designed to maximize reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS). With fully redundant, hot-pluggable components and hitless failover, the Topspin 270 provides a director-class 96-port switch for building scalable, highly available clusters.

Rapid Service Architecture
The Topspin 270 is designed to eliminate downtime. In large clusters, a key to minimizing downtime is the ability to rapidly service hardware and software upgrades. With fully redundant power, cooling and control processors, every system FRU (field replaceable unit) is hot-swappable and supports auto-failover. In the Topspin 270 Rapid ServiceT architecture, a passive mid-plane design isolates all active electronics on the front of the chassis, with all cables connected to the back. This enables switch modules to be replaced without detaching a single cable, a powerful concept when all ports are cabled and a board needs to be quickly replaced, improving MTTR (mean time to repair). Also, multiple system image versions automate rolling upgrades and rollback-further enhanced with the ability to auto-upgrade FRUs and components when inserted.

Intelligence
The Topspin 270 is designed to be an intelligent fabric, providing comprehensive chassis management and system-level management. The Topspin 270 auto-detects, isolates and auto-recovers failures at the component level. Each FRU actively reports health checks, including detection of potential problems such as rising temperature and error rates. A full suite of diagnostic health checks assesses all component health, proactively notifying the administrator.

The Topspin 270 also includes Topspin's embedded high performance subnet manager (HPSMT). The subnet manager database is intelligently synchronized across multiple controllers, enabling stateful failover if a switch fails-without losing transactions. The Topspin 270 quickly identifies and isolates trouble areas, or "hot spots." This is complemented with full performance monitoring, including graphing bandwidth utilization and error rates in real-time.

12X InfiniBand
The Topspin 270's removable line interface modules enable a smooth upgrade path to 12X InfiniBand capability. Each line interface module slot supports up to four non-blocking 12X InfiniBand ports at 30 Gbps. Up to 32 12X ports may be configured per Topspin 270 chassis. 12X support enables high-bandwidth connectivity to next generation servers. The technology is also applicable for connecting multiple switches when deploying multi-tier switch fabrics for high node count clusters. Topspin's flexible switch architecture accommodates next generation technology and provides an upgrade path for InfiniBand users without requiring the purchase of all new infrastructure.