The InfiniBand market is heating up with news from Novell that it would include OpenIB software in its SuSE Linux product, and Mellanox' announcement of a 10Gbps InfiniBand adapter.

Novell will include OpenIB in its release of SuSE Enterprise Linux Server 10. OpenIB is the open source version of the InfiniBand software stack.

Mellanox' MHES14 is a single-port 4X InfiniBand adapter that supports high-bandwidth, low-latency operations in data center environments, where it can be used to consolidate communications, computing, management and storage traffic onto a single fabric.

Using a single InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter (HCA) in a server and another in a storage node the MHES14 will take the place of several multi-port Gigabit Ethernet adapters or Fibre Channel host bus adapters, resulting in simplified cabling and management.

InfiniBand can support multiple traffic channels on a single interface and is important in grid computing fabrics that interconnect both server and storage nodes (see this InfiniBand primer).

Mellanox claims that infrastructure software such as VMware will benefit from the MHES14 HCA. When applications such as CRM, ERP, or financial software are run over InfiniBand, the performance increase of this high bandwidth, low-latency interconnect will become apparent.

Mellanox has joined the VMware Community Source program to develop high-performance virtual infrastructures.

The MHES14 InfiniBand HCA is priced the same as enterprise Gigabit Ethernet adapter prices and below that of Fibre Channel host bus adapters.

The MHES14 also supports Linux as well as Windows, AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS X, Solaris and VxWorks.