IBM, Dell, Sun vet InfiniBand

IBM, Dell and Sun Thursday are expected to give customers a glimpse of their intentions for the faster, next-generation I/O bus InfiniBand, which so far has languished in products from a handful of start-up vendors.

Earlier this year, Paceline, Infinicon and InfiniSwitch announced products that use the once-vaunted InfiniBand technology, developed four years ago by a partnership of Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell and Sun.

InfiniBand, however, has only so far received support from these start-up organizations and needs, according to analysts, a shot in the arm from vendors such as Sun, IBM and Dell.

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IBM, Dell and Sun Thursday are expected to give customers a glimpse of their intentions for the faster, next-generation I/O bus InfiniBand, which so far has languished in products from a handful of start-up vendors.

Earlier this year, Paceline, Infinicon and InfiniSwitch announced products that use the once-vaunted InfiniBand technology, developed four years ago by a partnership of Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell and Sun.

InfiniBand, however, has only so far received support from these start-up organizations and needs, according to analysts, a shot in the arm from vendors such as Sun, IBM and Dell.

"The announcement is well and fine, but the real proof of the pudding is when these vendors deliver products that people can deploy," says Jamie Gruener, senior analyst with the Yankee Group. "The large systems vendors need to take a more active role."

"Small start-ups such as InfiniSwitch, Infinicon and Paceline are already delivering products. It takes the large vendors however to create the market for it," Gruener says.

Instead of embracing the technology, a number of large systems vendors have instead spurned it.

Intel became one of the first vendors to step away from InfiniBand development when it squashed its 1x InfiniBand manufacturing. Microsoft, too, stepped away from active involvement in enabling .Net Server for InfiniBand, instead saying that they would support implementations from third-party vendors. And HP, once one of the most fervent supporters of the technology, seems pleased to offer it as an alternative to other technologies such as Myricom's Myrinet or Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA).

Although IBM expresses its support of the nascent technology, it recently disbanded its manufacture of 4x InfiniBand, sources say. The company will however, use InfiniBand host channel adapters, switches and management in its xSeries computers next year. It will also use the technology as a clustering interconnect and fabric for interprocessor communication for its mid- to high-end Unix servers. According to a source close to the company, IBM will be developing InfiniBand switching technology for use in these servers.

Sun plans to use InfiniBand in storage, servers, applications and switches. The company claims that the technology will also be used in its blade servers in 2004 and integrated into its storage virtualization appliances, as well as used in its Sun ONE environment.

Dell's claims that its upcoming PowerEdge modular blade servers, called bricks, will be InfiniBand ready. The company is at present testing InfiniBand clustering in its laboratories. Dell had earlier claimed that its bricks would be available by year-end.