A World of Bytes

Curt Monash

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Microsoft makes a scale-out play, and Cisco Infiniband is in the mix

By CurtMonash on Thu, 07/24/08 - 6:51pm.

Microsoft is buying DATAllegro for, in essence, its data warehouse scale-out technology. And guess what? DATAllegro relies on Infiniband. The last time I looked, DATAllegro's Infiniband supplier was Cisco.

Googling around, I get the impression that Microsoft has been up and down with Infiniband. First they sponsored Infiniband. Then they pulled back in 2002. But in 2007 and 2008 Microsoft has been talking about partnerships of some kind with small Infiniband providers.

All that said: Microsoft/DATAllegro will surely support many more hardware/storage/networking configurations than standalone little DATAllegro now runs on. Not all of these will include Infiniband (think 10GbE). And not all the Infiniband will be Cisco.

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About A World of Bytes

Curt Monash is a leading analyst of and strategic advisor to the software industry. Praised by Lawrence J. Ellison for his "unmatched insight into technology and marketplace trends," Curt was the software/services industry's #1 ranked stock analyst while at PaineWebber, Inc., where he served as a First Vice President until 1987. He subsequently co-founded Evernet, Inc., a $40 million networking systems integrator. Since 1990, he has owned and operated Monash Research, an analysis and advisory firm covering software-intensive sectors of the technology industry. In that period he also has been co-founder, president, or chairman of several other technology startups.

Curt has served as a strategic advisor to many well-known firms, including Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, AOL, CA, and Netezza. Curt earned a Ph.D. in mathematics (Game Theory) from Harvard University. He has held faculty positions in mathematics, economics and public policy at Harvard, Yale, and Suffolk universities.