Report Hedges High-Speed Bets

Alternative high-speed links can and will displace Fibre Channel in the near future, according to the latest Byte and Switch Insider, this sites paid subscription research service.

The report, “High-Speed Interconnects: Race to the Data Center,” says exploding data growth could force data center managers to upgrade their networks with Fibre Channel alternatives as early as next year.

While Fibre Channel vendors argue over whether to move to 8- or 10-Gbit/s from today's FC high of 4-Gbit/s, InfiniBand is already at 10-Gbit/s and moving quickly to 20-Gbit/s via Double Data Rate (DDR). Ethernet as a storage connection is emerging at 10 Gbit/s.

The surprise here is InfiniBand. Left for dead by storage networkers a couple of years ago, the connectivity option has found a niche for high-performance transaction processing (see InfiniBand of Brothers). It's favored as an internal linkage by suppliers of rackmount and blade servers, including Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ).

InfiniBand also found a new market in April 2005, when NAS vendor Isilon Systems started offering switches from Topspin (now ) and Mellanox Technologies Ltd. as a back-end connection between nodes for its clustered systems.Though Isilon gives customers a choice between gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand for its gear, CTO Sujal Patel is quoted in the report as saying that 90 percent of Isilon's custmers have chosen InfiniBand. “This year, customers are really beginning to accept the fact that InfiniBand is more mature and they could have it in the data center. We don’t require customers to change their infrastructure.”

But InfiniBand's moment of glory could be shortlived. According to the report, 10-Gbit/s Ethernet will eventually threaten all other forms of networking in data centers. For now, though, prices haven't dropped low enough to make that possible.

The availability of copper cabling as an alternative to more expensive fiberoptic cabling will be instrumental in 10-Gbit/s Ethernet's rise to data center power. But the first copper 10-Gbit/s Ethernet standard, 10GBase-CX4, approved by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 802.3ak committee in early 2004, supports data transmission to only 50 feet, as opposed to fiber's transmission up to six miles. More work needs to be done, and that could take a couple of years.

Meanwhile, a second 10-Gbit/s Ethernet alternative, Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol, or iWARP, is only just now showing up in chips. It runs remote direct memory access (RDMA) over TCP/IP, offloading data copy operations from the host by allowing one computer to directly place information in another computer's memory. Chip vendors hope RDMA succeeds where some TOE (TCP/IP offload) cards have failed in an attempt to do the same thing.

The upshot of all this is that data networkers will likely have several connectivity choices for a few years to come. This means Fibre Channel won't be disappearing, but it also means Ethernet and InfiniBand can't be discounted. Instead, the last two will offer competitive and even superior alternatives, given various configurations.The report takes a close look at developments and vendors in the InfiniBand and 10-Gbit/s Ethernet markets. Suppliers mentioned in the report include:

— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and SwitchHigh-Speed Interconnects: Race to the Data Center is available as part of an annual subscription (12 monthly issues) to Byte and Switch Insider, priced at $1,350. Individual reports are available for $900.

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