Sun Heats Up InfiniBand

Major vendors are lining up one by one behind InfiniBand, making for gains in high performance computing (HPC) and eventually, some hope, a mainstream interconnect technology.

Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today added InfiniBand startups Topspin Communications Inc., InfiniCon Systems Inc., and Voltaire Inc.

to its high performance and technical computing (HPTC) alliance program. Last week IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) said it would resell Topspin InfiniBand switches across its eServer and TotalStorage platforms ( see IBM Strikes InfiniBand Deal).

Sun’s support helps validate that there is a market for InfiniBand,” says Jamie Gruener, senior analyst at Yankee Group. “We continue to see traction by InfiniBand-based systems in the high-performance market. And there will be some opportunities in the commercial space in the next two years.”

Sun is the volume leader among HPTC vendors, according to IDC, and sees the alliance program as a chance to advance grid computing. It’s still questionable if system vendors will ever take InfiniBand seriously as an open interconnect technology along with Ethernet and Fibre Channel, but InfiniBand might be halfway there with IBM and Sun in its corner.

“We still have to hear from more server vendors,” Gruener says. “HP has to weigh in, and Dell has to weigh in.”Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) has been lukewarm on InfiniBand. “We see InfiniBand as a high-end niche fabric,” says HP server marketing VP Paul Miller, who then adds, “We will follow the economics of InfiniBand.” That’s hardly a ringing endorsement as a technology for commercial applications. Dell was an early InfiniBander, but has yet to declare its intentions after the technology stumbled coming out of the gates.

InfiniCon marketing executive VP Chuck Foley says Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) could be the most important player in pushing InfiniBand to the commercial space. Oracle will use InfiniCon switches to demonstrate its new 10g clustered database at Linux World this week, and InfiniBand backers say their technology is the best choice to run the high-performance transaction application.

“Oracle 10g is the first commercial application that has taken advantage of InfiniBand,” Foley says. “It needs something like InfiniBand to run the way it’s designed to run.” Gruener agrees that Oracle 10g could speed InfiniBand’s acceptance in the enterprise.

“[Commercial] expectations for InfiniBand are lower than they were in 2001,” he says. “That helps focus InfiniBand where it makes most sense. That’s in the high-performance, online transaction space with Oracle 10g; and eventually high-performance grids might end up commercially available.”

Peter ffoulkes, communications manager of Sun’s HPTC group, says Sun considers InfiniBand "quite a big deal."“One of the places we see InifniBand is as one of the technologies that enable people to modularize their data center infrastructure,” he says.

He said for that to happen, InfiniBand will have to get into the market and prove itself, and robust management software will have to become available. The process could be a long one. “Any shift in the market takes years to work out,” ffoulkes says.

Topspin, which has been more OEM-centric than InfiniCon and Voltaire, will probably have its switches shipping with IBM products late this year or early next year. InfiniCon and Voltaire have concentrated on HPC applications. Today InfiniCon announced that Penn State University

and the AMD Developer Center have chosen its switches for high-performance computing clusters. Voltaire announced Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) (NYSE: SGI) Professional services will sell Voltaire InfiniBand products with SGI Altix servers; and Sandia National Laboratories picked Voltaire products to power its 128-node HPC cluster (see SGI, Sandia Pick Voltaire InfiniBand).

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch