Patent ID: 7843962

Claim:
A method carrying InfiniBand (IB) packets over a long distance connection, comprising: receiving IB packets from a first IB interface over a first link state; encapsulating the received IB packets within a long distance protocol in an encapsulation unit connected to the first IB interface; transmitting the encapsulated IB packets over the long distance connection (WAN); receiving the encapsulated IB packets at a de-encapsulation unit; de-encapsulating the received IB packets in the de-encapsulation unit by removing the encapsulation and recovering the IB packets; buffering the recovered IB packets in a bulk buffer memory that exceeds 128 KiB; delivering the recovered IB packets to a second interface over a second link state; regulating the flow of IB packets over the WAN by a credit management unit so that no packets are discarded by the receiving bulk buffer memory due to insufficient capacity; and maintaining an IB physical link state machine and IB style flow control over the WAN to distances greater than about 10 km, the IB physical link state machine and IB style flow control being maintained between the encapsulation unit, the WAN, the de-encapsulation unit, the bulk buffer memory and the credit management unit.