InfiniBand Group Sharply, Evenly Divided

Although Microsoft, Intel and HP have abandoned InfiniBand for now, IBM, Sun and Dell vowed Thursday to solider on, effectively splitting the InfiniBand Trade Association into two camps—believers and non-believers.

by Clint Boulton of internetnews.com [December 20, 2002]

Months after half of the founding members of the InfiniBand Trade Association put aside InfiniBand because they deemed it impractical at this juncture in IT, the other half rallied around the once ballyhooed technology, and pledged to bring products to the fore next year.

Systems vendors IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Dell Thursday were the remaining major torch-bearers for the high-speed switch fabric architecture (speeding up communications between servers and networked devices at 10 gigabytes-per-second), while Microsoft, Intel, and HP took themselves out of the mix—for now.

The promise of juiced-up application performance once lured many infrastructure firms. InfiniBand offers features for I/O interconnects, including a mechanism to share I/O components among many servers. The architecture is designed to create a more efficient way to connect storage, communications networks and server clusters together. InfiniBand is also designed to integrate with Ethernet and Fibre Channel infrastructure.

IBM, Sun, and Dell said they will use the technology for various aspects of their server lines. Dr. Tom Bradicich, chief technology officer of IBM's xSeries servers, said his Armonk, N.Y.-based firm will enable an InfiniBand switched network that includes a host channel adapter, switch, and a fabric management on its eServer xSeries line. Moreover, for its next generation of mid-range and high-end Unix servers, IBM is developing a common clustering interconnect and IPC fabric using InfiniBand I/O. With this, Bradicich said, Big Blue's customers will be able to satisfy application requirements for high-performance computing and server clustering.

Sun and Dell also see InfiniBand as a vital part of future server technologies. Round Rock, Texas' Dell will fit its PowerEdge modular blades with the architecture and is currently testing InfiniBand cluster solutions in its labs, as well as teaming with its myriad hardware and software partners to increase support for the technology.

Sun might be leaning on InfiniBand the most, according to some analysts, as it plans to use InfiniBand as the linchpin of its N1 strategy to make many computers work together. Subodh Bapat, CTO of volume systems products at Sun, said his Santa Clara, Calif. firm plans to plaster InfiniBand technology across its server platforms, application environments, switches and storage. Future InfiniBand-based platforms are expected to include Sun's blade servers in 2004 and enterprise servers as well as storage virtualization and aggregation products and controllers. On the software front, Sun plans to use InfiniBand to enhance Sun Open Net Environment (Sun ONE) products for Web services.

The bulls and the bears of InfiniBand
Why are IBM, Sun, and Dell speaking up now? In a nutshell, InfiniBand has suffered from a deluge of bad publicity in the last several months since the other half put aside their InfiniBand endeavors. For example, Enterprise Storage Group Senior Analyst Arun Taneja said he was asked six months ago if the low-latency technology was dead. Not in the least bit, Taneja said.

"I think it's a big mistake for Microsoft to back away from InfiniBand, or put it on the back-burner as they have," Taneja said. "Microsoft, as well as all of its partners, probably has the most to win from InfiniBand because fundamentally it is a technology that will allow standard Intel-based servers to be ganged up and produce performance that the largest Intel server is not capable of producing."

Microsoft submitted this statement:

"In the current economic climate, IT managers are gravitating towards evolutionary technologies that leverage existing infrastructure and staffing," the company said. "The emphasis today is on efficiency not expansion, incremental growth not wholesale replacement. Although we have decided to discontinue developing native IB support, we will continue to enable third parties to deploy Windows IB solutions. As we do with other leading edge technologies, we will monitor the industry interest in InfiniBand and apply necessary resources to meet customer and partner demand."

Instead, Microsoft endorsed Ethernet technologies: "Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet technologies meet most customers' needs and deliver the very best price/performance, even if they don't provide the absolute best performance. There are a number of types of applications (databases, high performance computing) that effectively utilize the capabilities of IB but these applications work best in a completely optimized environment that's best provided by third parties."

Karl Walker, vice president of technological development/CTO of hardware for HP's Industry Standard Servers unit, echoed Microsoft's philosophy that InfiniBand is just not practical at this point and said it is simply too risky a proposition.

"We saw InfiniBand go through the hype curve," Walker said. "Two years ago at this time, it was supposed to be the be all-end-all of fabric and storage interconnect. I can't speak in detail about why the others [Microsoft and Intel] dropped away, but we don't see a mass market in the near term. Who knows where it might go in the future? But we pulled back when we learned it wasn't going to hit the volume level of our expectations. We do see it as something that could be successful in the specialized markets, such as in high-performance clustering and as [an architecture] for replacing proprietary interconnect technologies. We're taking a wait-and see kind of attitude."

Walker said HP is playing it safe by using other fabrics, such as TCP/IP and Fibre Channel.

"We see customers who already have investments in technologies as augmenting their infrastructure with InfiniBand, but not replacing it entirely," Walker said. "As far as making InfiniBand the interconnect on specific systems such as blade servers, that is extremely risky, because you need to make a multi-year, multi-generational bet."

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