Vendors rev InfiniBand engine

SAN FRANCISCO - At last week's Intel Developer Forum, users got a glimpse of some of the key InfiniBand-based server and network devices that promise to alleviate many of the bottlenecks clogging server, storage and other network devices.

InfiniBand products, which will likely hit the market in force later this year, yield data throughput of 2.5G to 30G bit/sec - current bus technology supports speeds up to 1G byte/sec.

InfiniBand's switch fabric I/O technology also can be used to connect server, storage and network devices more elegantly than traditional bus technology such as PCI or PCI-X. That's because InfiniBand switches and routers provide features such as direct memory-to-memory connections for clustered servers, which will speed data transfers. Boxes supporting InfiniBand also will offload a lot of the overhead associated with TCP/IP processing from server CPUs, freeing them up to process data faster and more efficiently, proponents say.

Given InfiniBand's ability to support increased throughput and performance on the network, server and storage devices, the number of products supporting it will grow rapidly, according to IDC.The market research firm expects the number of InfiniBand-enabled servers to grow to 4.3 million by 2004. And a host of InfiniBand network gear is in the works from IBM, Intel, Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Sun. Start-ups InfiniSwitch, InfiniCon Systems and Paceline are working on switch products. Others, such as Lane 15 and Vieo, are creating management software.

Companies showing off their InfiniBand gear last week included Mellanox Technologies, Voltaire and CATC. Mellanox demonstrated a blade server that uses InfiniBand as a high-speed server connectivity technology, while Voltaire showcased its InfiniBand router. CATC demonstrated its InfiniBand test appliance, which is designed to let system developers make sure InfiniBand-enabled devices work properly using the InfiniBand protocol.

Voltaire's InfiniBand router, which is slated to ship in the second quarter, is designed to serve as a backbone interconnect, which lets users string together storage, network and server devices. But the router also can translate traffic from the InfiniBand protocol back to TCP/IP - essentially terminating the session connections and restarting them to let traffic pass at high speeds for local server or storage clusters, says Ronnie Kenneth, CEO of Voltaire. That dual role as high-speed interconnect and TCP/IP bridge could make it attractive to early adopters, observers say.

Mellanox showed off server blades running Message Passing Interface (MPI) clustering software. The InfiniBand and MPI technologies let multiple server blades act like a single server, giving the small boxes the ability to take on complex financial, scientific and engineering tasks for less money than traditional high-end servers. Users could then split up those systems for other uses when specific tasks are completed - making the systems more flexible.

A key application for InfiniBand will be blade server environments, where many systems are clustered together, because interconnect speed both performance and the ability to use servers efficiently says Tom Manter, an analyst with Aberdeen Group. Users also will see performance benefits in their storage-area networks and traditional clusters, he says.

Intel, one of the companies leading the InfiniBand charge, says users with existing investments in SCSI, Fibre Channel or Ethernet-based networks can add InfiniBand without having to sacrifice their legacy I/O systems through the use of InfiniBand-to-IP, -SCSI, or -Fibre bridges.

In other InfiniBand news, the InfiniBand Trade Association (ITA), a consortium of vendors including Intel, Microsoft, Sun and HP, says it plans to kick off during the second quarter of this year a series of lecture "road shows" designed to educate users on InfiniBand I/O.

The ITA is designing the lectures to give users useful information that will help them get ready to use InfiniBand when it arrives later this year. The ITA also plans to host a conference in early April.

The IDG News Service contributed to this story.

Defining InfiniBand InfiniBand is next-generation I/O technology for high-speed connectivity between servers, switches and storage devices. Unlike traditional hardware-specific tech-nology, InfiniBand is a switch fabric that serves as a universal connectivity bus. What are InfiniBand's benefits? Where are InfiniBand products likely to have greatest impact?   •   Faster than traditional I/O systems.   •   Data centers: Saves space, suited to distributed environment.   •   Fabric design eliminates the possibility of I/O being a single point of failure.   •   Service providers: Reliable, multipurpose technology.   •   Serves multiple hardware interconnects.   •   Financial applications: Should handle database- intensive applications well. What are InfiniBand’s drawbacks?   •   Complexity.   •   Few platforms support it as yet.   •   Bleeding edge, for now, so users will need to perform extensive testing.