Mellanox First with 40-Gig InfiniBand Adapter

Mellanox has become the first supplier to offer 40 Gbit/s InfiniBand adapters in anticipation of what the company claims is an emerging market for faster InfiniBand interconnects in large data centers.

"Customers are benchmarking these adapters today," claims Thad Omura, VP of product marketing at Mellanox. Once the adapters are proven to work with various cable types and two-node clusters, he says OEMs will start to look for 40 Gbit/s switches, which Mellanox plans to offer in the second half of this year.

Mellanox publicly demonstrated the adapters at tradeshows last year, with a cabling solution from partner Luxtera. Today's announcement is about Mellanox shipping the dual-port ConnectX IB 40 Gbit/s (QDR) InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter (HCA). Pricing will be at a 30 percent to 40 percent premium over the $350 or so the vendor presently charges for a DDR (20 Gbit/s) InfiniBand adapter.

Mellanox claims its new HCAs support up to 6,500 Mbyte/s throughput in bidirectional mode. Each conforms to the PCIe Gen2 form factor and comes with InfiniBand or QSFP connectors.

Potential customers include OEMs of data center gear who are eyeing the use of faster InfiniBand as a high-performance computing interconnect. "HPC, the high end of enterprise clustering, financial applications -- that is where you'll see initial demand," Omura says.Mellanox won't say which OEMs are presently testing the new adapter, but the company's press statement comes with endorsements and vows of use from Amphenol, Gore, Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, Quellan, Reflex Photonics, and Zarlink.

So far, Mellanox, which also makes 10 Gbit/s Ethernet adapters and is involved in the Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE) project, is the only vendor shipping an actual 40 Gbit/s InfiniBand product. QLogic spokesman Frank Berry, contacted today for comment, said his company will have 40 Gbit/s, but declined to say when.

Mellanox's announcement comes amid a fresh swell of enthusiasm over InfiniBand. IDC predicts that revenue from InfiniBand adapters will show a 35 percent compound annual growth rate through 2011, and switch port revenues will grow at an estimated average of 47.2 percent in the same timeframe.

Of course, everything's relative. Even with the predicted growth, InfiniBand remains a small market compared with Ethernet overall. And in the view of many, as soon as 10 Gbit/s Ethernet and/or FCOE start to make headway, they could displace InfiniBand in the data center.

That could be several years away, however. For now, at least a few high-end customers are interested in the kind of rates Mellanox promises. "Those who have the real need for speed and low latency today -- who have also been the core market for InfiniBand -- now have something to crow about: being faster than say 10-Gbit/s Ethernet, at least for now," states Greg Schulz of the StorageIO Group. "While I doubt that we will see any 40-Gbit/s InfiniBand-based purpose built storage systems, for now the primary market will be for those who need low latency for server clustering or large-scale data movement between servers or those supporting I/O virtualization."Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.