InfiniBand Ambivalence

Just when things are looking up for InfiniBand, the technology's future is being questioned yet again, as it faces challenges from startups and standards bodies.

Consider the news, for instance, that husband-and-wife entrepreneurs Judy Estrin and Bill Carrico have targeted InfiniBand and other I/O solutions with a new startup, Precision I/O, claiming to have a cheaper and easier-to-implement method based on standard Ethernet (see Startup Claims InfiniBand Alternative).

Because InfiniBand is essentially a new protocol that calls for new hardware, Estrin says users will resist it, and its future outside specific niche applications isn't guaranteed. Of course, Estrin claims her Ethernet-based technology, as yet unseen and unproven, is just what's needed.

Others are looking for alternative standards, including members of the RDMA Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which are exploring the use of Remote Direct Memory Access, or RDMA, over IP. By extending the link used between processors insider servers to operate over IP, developers hope to overcome the latency caused by TCP/IP and operating system overhead that InfiniBand addresses. While development of RDMA-over-IP is still nascent, proponents say it will compete with InfiniBand in cost and efficiency.

All of this comes just as InfiniBand is finally enjoying long-awaited support from server vendors, including Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), which now all have plans to sell or resell InfiniBand products (see Dell Joins InfiniBand, HP Enhances Servers and Storage, Sun Heats Up InfiniBand, and IBM Strikes InfiniBand Deal).Despite the votes of confidence, the IT world remains ambivalent about InfiniBand. On one hand, the technology is stable and in use in high-performance computing (HPC) environments. On the other, the numbers aren't there yet when it comes to installation in "normal" data centers, where there's still a lot of talk about InfiniBand being too heavy an upgrade and one that has won its place in HPC only by default.

"Customers want network unity, not separate networks in the data center," says Estrin. Putting InfiniBand in place calls for installing a distinct network fabric, she asserts, with all the costs that implies.

"[A]fter some playing around with differentand competing standards efforts, the industry finally rallied aroundInfiniband... However, even though a standard, volumes are not high,so prices are high, and if the technology is ever used between boxes (as opposed to being contained within a blade server), end users need to manage a new protocol and technology, which carries with it a high 'initialization' cost," writes Mark Hoover, president and co-founder of Acuitive Inc.

In fact, at least one source, Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group consultancy, concedes that InfiniBand could be displaced if a comparable solution that's easier and cheaper to install were to come along fast enough. "If you could prove substantially better performance, it could be a killer," he says.

Taneja is skeptical, however, about whether other solutions can materialize quickly enough to threaten InfiniBand's growth, even if that growth is relatively slow.The possibility exists, albeit remotely. Estrin claims Precision I/O is on track to announce products midyear. And most RDMA-over-IP components appear to be "on the drawing board."

InfiniBand proponents seem unfazed. "Powerpoints have no worth," says Stu Aaron, VP of marketing at Topspin Communications Inc., which is OEMing its InfiniBand gear to all the major server makers. The speed of InfiniBand alone ensures it will stay "a generation" ahead of Ethernet for the foreseeable future, he asserts.

"You can look at competitors in a number of different lights, but the truth is that InfiniBand remains the only standards-based clustering interconnect at the price points it offers," says Allyson Klein, a manager at Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), who also is Intel's representative to the InfiniBand Trade Association. She says HPC InfiniBand deployments number in the hundreds of thousands of nodes, and data centers are taking it up, though enterprise customers are more reticent about letting the world know they're using InfiniBand.

It's tough to predict whether InfiniBand will face a disruptive solution anytime soon. One decisive factor may be whether a new offering supports speeds greater than 10 Gbit/s, as InfiniBand now does. Both Aaron of Topspin and Klein of Intel believe that's unlikely. Even Estrin concedes that 10-Gbit/s won't likely emerge in full force until 2005 (no surprise, she says Precision I/O will be ready).

Bottom line? Despite much grousing and grumbling, InfiniBand is emerging as the next de facto high-speed clustering solution. Unlike earlier industry standards like Ethernet or TCP/IP, however, InfiniBand seems to be meeting as much resistance as market embrace. Its position could be very tenuous if an alternative actually materializes soon enough to challenge it.Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch