Banderacom Abandons InfiniBand

InfiniBand chip startup Banderacom Inc. has officially shelved three years of hard work on next-generation interconnect technology and is repositioning the company for the Ethernet market, company officials tell Byte and Switch.

It took about $44 million in funding and more than 80 employees to get Banderacom's 1x and 4x InfiniBand host channel adapter (HCA) and switch silicon ready for production this month. But unfortunately, the InfiniBand market has not materialized as everyone expected -- and Banderacom has pulled the plug (see Banderacom Bows to Pressure).

"With Intel Corp.'s (Nasdaq: INTC) pullout, then IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and everything in between, we realized there was no volume in the near term to justify a full blown release of our products," says Ric Maule, Banderacom's CEO. Maule replaces Les Crudele, who resigned October 1, 2002, but remains on the company's board (see Intel Bails on InfiniBand, Microsoft Backs Off InfiniBand, IBM Kills InfiniBand Chip, and IBM Puts IB Chips up for Sale).

"The worst thing you can do is to sell a little bit of product to some customers and incur all the support costs, but the revenue never shows up," says Maule. Although server vendors have paid oodles of lip service to InfiniBand, none are actually shipping products that support it yet, leaving suppliers like Banderacom seriously in the lurch (see Server Vendors Hold IB Pep Rally).

Maule blames the slump in the economy for the lack of adoption of InfiniBand, not its performance capabilities, which he says still outshine any other data-center interconnect technology available today. "It boils down to the freeze on IT spending," he says. "An IT manager saying to his CIO that he needs a new thing on the host and the target and in the network is a tough sell in this climate."For the next couple of years, Maule believes, it's going to be Ethernet or Fibre Channel in the data center. "For us, it's Ethernet... There's not a lot of activity for new functionality for Fibre Channel -- just new speeds -- but there are new niches occurring on the Ethernet side."

We took a guess and asked if Banderacom is developing RMDA (Remote Direct Memory Access) over TCP/IP chips, which provides the same functionality as InfiniBand but over Ethernet networks. Maule says the company is exploring this and other areas, but preferred to stay undercover on the company's plans at this point. "There's lots of activity around extensions for storage, iSCSI and IP storage, and we are studying it all carefully," he says (see RDMA Rumbles Along).

The startup has pared back its operation to a core team of about 20 engineers and will be looking for another round of funding at some point this year. Previous investors in the company include Austin Ventures, Crossroads Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CRDS), Intel Capital, JatoTech Ventures, QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq: QLGC), and Trinity Ventures. The company closed its second round, of $35 million, in June 2001.

Before joining Banderacom, Ric Maule ran 3Com Corp.'s (Nasdaq: COMS) mobile and wireless business, and prior to that he was a senior executive at high-end graphics firm Evans & Sutherland