By Sandra Gittlen
Network World, 09/24/01

Call it the elixir for one of the last network bottlenecks. InfiniBand, the next evolution in PC I/O architecture, is poised to overthrow PCI as the de facto standard for servers. But despite growing credibility, the elixir's effects won't be felt in the average enterprise server immediately.

"InfiniBand's impact on PCI is going to be very large," says Arun Taneja, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. "PCI has shown no movement whatsoever in terms of getting wider and better and faster."

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And, for once, the hype is matched by serious heft. Industry heavyweights such as Intel, Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft and Sun have molded the technology. The InfiniBand Trade Association, formed in 1999, boasts more than 200 members. Among them are start-ups such as Paceline Systems, Lane 15 Software and VIEO, who have benefited from more than $200 million in venture capital funding, according to market research firm IDC.

Borne from two competing standards - Future I/O, developed by Compaq, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and Next Generation I/O, developed by Intel, Dell, Microsoft and Sun - InfiniBand does away with PCI's shared bus approach. Instead, Version 1.0 of the specification, released about a year ago, features a point-to-point switched fabric designed to conquer the logjam created when massive amounts of data travel into a server and between components. Offering throughput speeds of up to 2.5G byte/sec, InfiniBand is an incredible boost from today's PCI and PCI-X maximum of 1G byte/sec. It also promises scalability for relatively lower costs, Taneja says.

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Gear later this year

Backers of the specification say production of InfiniBand-enabled gear will start later this year, with products hitting the street by early 2002. Already, companies are testing their prototypes in Intel's InfiniBand interoperability lab.

IDC predicts worldwide shipments of InfiniBand-enabled servers will hit almost 7 million by 2005. A host of other InfiniBand network gear is also in the works. Start-ups InfiniSwitch, InfiniCon Systems and Paceline are currently working on switch products. Meanwhile, Lane 15 and VIEO are creating management software, for example.

InfiniBand

But before companies start looking for department-level InfiniBand servers and switches, Intel warns that initial products will be targeted solely at huge server farms, particularly for clustered servers and storage. This is still good news for companies with large data centers such as investment firms, banks, brokerages and global corporations.

What to ask InfiniBand vendors: Has your product been certified by Intel's interoperability lab? What other products interoperate with yours? What network management software supports your product? Will I have to replace all my servers to take advantage of InfiniBand? Do my peripherals need to be upgraded to support InfiniBand?

"InfiniBand acts as a rack interconnect in a data center," says Philip Brace, director of platform marketing at Intel. "As you grow, you can add more links - copper or optical."

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Management built in

Brace points to the distance gains in using InfiniBand within the data center. "With PCI, you have inches on a motherboard; InfiniBand gives you up to 17 meters with copper and up to 100 meters with optical. It allows you to get I/O out of the box."

InfiniBand comprises a host channel adapter that sits at the server and target channel adapters that are located in peripherals such as storage devices. The adapters communicate with each other so security and quality-of-service levels can be built in.

"The architects of InfiniBand decided from the beginning that they wanted management aspects right in the spec and not as an afterthought," says Ramon Acosta, vice president of industry initiatives at Lane 15 Software in Austin, Texas.

The specification outlines more than seven management functions, including a device manager that deals with the various elements of a network; a baseboard manager that handles the physical parts of the chassis such as limitations of LEDs; a communications manager that lets devices talk to each other; and a subnet manager that controls the connections between the network elements.

"When you build an InfiniBand subnet, connect everything with wires and power it up, nothing happens," Acosta says. "The subnet manager goes out, discovers all the devices on the network - the host, targets and routers - and initializes them with addresses, configures the routing tables and then activates the various devices. Now these devices can talk. If there are any failures, the subnet manager detects them and modifies the routing table accordingly."

Some network managers say InfiniBand could be just the cure for what's ailing them. "We'll most realize [the power of InfiniBand] in the speed of our peripherals," says Tom Gonzales, senior network administrator at the Colorado State Employees Credit Union in Denver. He says he's looking forward to new devices that could take advantage of InfiniBand, such as external security devices that help police the network.

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