Primarily used to connect one chassis to another chassis through the use of external cabling, the SFF-8088 has become the most widely used cable interconnect. A SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 (External) is capable of carrying four data lanes (equivelant to an external version of the SFF-8087). One important feature here is the fact that the SFF-8088 cables “lock” into place which is important as an external connection method. The locked cables allow some pressure to be applied to the installed cable without dislodging the cable, possibly causing an entire chassis of drives to go “offline.” This is an important distinction over external connector types like eSATA that are susceptible to being pulled out.Infiniband, what can it not do? For those that do not know Infiniband, it is more or less a high-performance computing fabric developed to achieve high bandwidth and low latencies.
