- The agreement will see development of an abstract fabric manager built on the concepts of Distributed Management Task Force’s (DMTF) Redfish standard
- Recently, the Gen-Z Consortium released its Gen-Z Fabric Management Specification 0.7 Draft to the public
The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) and Gen-Z Consortium have entered a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to advance the industry standardisation of open-source fabric management. The MoU will create a framework for a series of technical exchange meetings between the two organisations to determine future activities.
Paul Grun, OFA Chair said, “The OFA is driven by its simple mission statement, which is to accelerate the development, support and adoption of next generation fabrics and fabric interfaces for the benefit of the advanced networks ecosystem – including interconnects such as Gen-Z.A guiding principle of the OpenFabrics Interfaces (OFI) project has been its ‘consumer driven’ approach, whereby development of the libfabric suite is driven by requirements articulated by its consumers. Thus, the OFA believes that collaboration with the Gen-Z Consortium will provide further valuable insights into the uses and applications of the libfabric API, leading to continued improvement in the suite as a whole.”
Distributed Management Task Force’s (DMTF) Redfish standard
The two organisations said that potential activities that are outlined in the agreement include joint development of a roadmap guiding future enhancements and development of the libfabric API. It also includes development of an abstract fabric manager built on the concepts of Distributed Management Task Force’s (DMTF) Redfish standard.
Redfish is a widely adopted infrastructure management interface industry standard. It is designed to be scalable that allows it to target systems ranging in size from small clusters all to the largest High-performance computing (HPC) systems.
Gen-Z Consortium president Kurtis Bowman said, “The agreement between the Gen-Z Consortium and OFA sets the groundwork for future activities that will benefit both organizations and the industry at large. We look forward to working with the Open Fabrics Alliance in the future to promote and advance open-source fabrics.”
Gen-Z Fabric Management Specification 0.7 Draft
Recently, the Gen-Z Consortium released its Gen-Z Fabric Management Specification 0.7 Draft to the public. It comes with in-band management for composable compute, memory and storage using industry-standard protocols. It points out key system features and requirements which have to be supported by the Gen-Z fabric’s management stack
