To InfiniBand and beyond, cry firms

August 13, 2002 —

Widely deployed interconnect technologies such as Ethernet and iSCSI may have some stiff competition from a new, faster and heftier networking protocol that has begun to make waves in the industry.

Called InfiniBand, the architecture is a next-generation short-distance input/output technology that uses a networked approach to connecting servers and network devices; it is ideally suited for use in data centres. Today InfiniBand operates at speeds of 2.5Gbps to 10Gbps and is expected to reach speeds of up to 30Gbps as it evolves.

Designed to overcome several limitations of the shared-memory and bus I/O architectures, InfiniBand is "well-positioned to quickly become the transport of choice for server networks that support inter-processor communications and server clustering," according to Boston-based Aberdeen Group white paper, InfiniBand Architecture: Planning the Next Generation Data Centre.

Although relatively new to the industry, InfiniBand has caught the eye of more than 150 companies worldwide, including the likes of IBM Corp., Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Dell Computer Corp. These companies make up the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) an organization geared to forwarding the development of the two-year-old technology.

According to Don Kerr, director of the Canadian Advanced Systems Group with Dell Canada in Markham, Ont., InfiniBand is one of the most exciting technologies Dell has seen. He said the company believes the technology will be absolutely critical in enabling Dell to deliver more scalable systems that not only provide better performance, but does so in a standardized manner.

Kerr explained that when looking inside most servers and computers today, there are buses that have memory and processors and disk controllers plugged into them. He said that the problem with these buses is that they have a finite capacity in terms of being able to add things to them. The more processors and the more memory put on the buses, the faster they get flooded.

"What this has meant from a computing perspective is that the amount of raw computing power that you can put together and apply to a specific problem has been limited to the capacity of those buses," he said.

In order to address this, many companies worked toward clustering

Network World Canada