Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Infiniband in the Enterprise?

I recently (6 months ago) began working with a storage product from Isilon Systems, which uses Infiniband for back end communication. Infiniband (IB) was a term I hadn’t heard in 3 years. In 2002, it was said to be the next big thing in the storage and networking world. I don’t believe the demand for 30Gb low latency connectivity was there 3 years ago. With the explosion of digital content and clustered computing, it seems IB has been raised from the dead. Some of the fastest Oracle RAC implementations in the world use IB for cluster interconnect communication. With 4Gb FC emerging in the storage arena and 10Gb Copper in the network arena, does IB have a place? Obviously, Cisco bought Topspin for a reason- Will they kill the technology or push it as a standard in one of these areas? I did some research on the subject, and posted some facts below.

* Cisco purchased TopSpin, one of the largest providers of IB equipment on 04/14/05
* At least 1 Major Server vendor will release IB cards in their blade servers Q4 2005
* IB offers the lowest latency and highest throughput off all the technologies mentioned.
* MAC has released IB support for their hardware
* 10Gb Copper manufacturer Chelsio has released a 10Gb TOE card they claim outperforms IB at a price point of $795
* Embedded computing vendor SBS Techologies imbeds IB into their products.
* All major server vendors have support for IB cards in their servers.

From everything I have read, I believe IB is here to stay. It will be interesting to see how IB offering expands over the next 2 years.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's up man... Good to see you're blogging... Now I need to get off my ass and get mine up to date.

Intilop said...

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