InfiniBand a year later

The InfiniBand specification turned a year old last week, just a few months before some of the first InfiniBand products are set to ship to the industry.

InfiniBand is a channel-based, switched fabric technology that provides performance ranging from 500M byte/sec to 6G byte/sec. When fully implemented, it promises to alleviate many of the bottlenecks clogging servers and storage systems today

The technology has made many strides in a short time. Over the last year, vendors of silicon products and management software have sponsored interoperability demonstrations between their products. And vendors such as Mellanox have shown how PCI-to-InfiniBand and PCI-to-PCI bridging over InfiniBand works.

Vendors have also shown 10G bit/sec copper connections, as well as small form factor (SFP) connectors that work with InfiniBand.

And now, vendors are starting to talk about introducing the first InfiniBand switches.

OmegaBand announced an 8-port switch, the IBgate 1000, this fall, which has two or four InfiniBand ports and two or four Gigabit Ethernet ports.

InfiniSwitch announced last week that it would use IBM's InfiniBlue chip technology in its upcoming switches. InfiniSwitch's products will provide server-to-server interconnections, as well as connectivity to Fibre Channel, Ethernet and iSCSI devices.

InfiniSwitch demonstrated its first product at the recent Intel Developer's Forum. Called the Leaf Switch, it is a 1U (1.75-inch) high, rack-mounted 32-port switch that provides connectivity between end nodes and other switches. It is designed for the data center.

Deni Connor is a senior editor at Network World covering storage, SANs, Novell and Novell-related products. You can reach her at dconnor@nww.com.

Servers archive
Past issues of Network World on Servers.

InfiniBand products proliferate at Interop
Network World, 05/07/01

Mellanox's Web site

OmegaBand's Web site

InfiniSwitch's Web site

Shake-up at RLX
Network World, 10/29/01