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InfiniBand finds favor in testing
By Jeff Miller
It's finally showtime for InfiniBand, a young interconnect architecture that promises to increase the speed and efficiency of the data center by several orders of magnitude. Across the country, startups developing InfiniBand-based machines and components are finally putting their gear into customer beta tests, with the hope of launching products early next year.
"We're moving into the phase of true product evaluation, away from developer kits to actual beta products," said Vernon Turner, a group vice president at International Data Corp., a research firm based in Framingham. "Only once the industry actually gets to kick the tires can (InfiniBand) get momentum. It's a crucial time for the industry."
In New England, for example, two InfiniBand switch makers - Paceline Systems Inc. in Acton and InfiniSwitch Corp. in Westborough - have sold boxes to Sandia National Laboratories' California office for evaluation.
"I hope (InfiniBand) will be a potential replacement for our mid-range computing networking," said Curt Janssen, a team leader at Sandia in Livermore, Calif. "We hope to be able to simplify, lower costs and improve reliability." Janssen said that Sandia is looking at many products. His current position on the technology's performance? "It's too early to tell," Janssen said. Paceline said that it is also in trials at four other sites.
InfiniSwitch said last month that its box is participating in a trial at the Cornell Theory Center, a high-performance research lab at Cornell University. InfiniSwitch declined to specify the number of trials in which it is participating, though Jean Hoxie-Wasko, vice president of marketing at InfiniSwitch, said that it has 1,000 ports deployed.
Likewise, Voltaire Inc. in Bedford, which makes a router that acts as a bridge between InfiniBand and Ethernet networks, said that it has its gear in trials with a number of large financial institutions, though the company declined to identify them. All three companies hope to have their gear on the market by the first quarter of 2003.
The InfiniBand architecture aims to speed up data transfer by taking most of the I/O processing out of the software stack and putting it onto hardware. Proponents see InfiniBand eventually replacing the PCI bus used internally in PCs.
"In the past we've used Ethernet and fiber channel," said John Hanratty, vice president of marketing at Paceline. "They're good at what they do, but performance and intimacy of applications requires something much more, something that allows them to connect directly, memory to memory."
For example, the existing data transfer architecture greatly taxes server processors. In tests conducted by Intel, researchers found that simply managing the I/O devices on a gigabit Ethernet architecture occupied 70 to 80 percent of the resources of a server's central processing unit (CPU). With InfiniBand, transferring data took only up 3 to 5 percent of the CPU.
"That means that with InfiniBand, CPUs have more time to do work with real applications," said Allyson Klein, a marketing manager for I/O technologies at Intel and Intel's representative to the InfiniBand working group.
In addition, proponents claim data centers will be much easier to manage with InfiniBand fabric unifying the pieces of a corporate network, which might use fiber channel to connect storage networks, Ethernet for the local area network (LAN), and additional proprietary technologies to connect other devices. InfiniBand has seen its share of hype in the past three years, which is not surprising considering the tech heavyweights involved in its birth.
InfiniBand was created when two competing designs merged: Future I/O, which was developed by Compaq, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and Next Generation I/O, spearheaded by Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. Last year, however, announcements by Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. took some of the air out of the evangelists' balloons.
Intel said that it would not produce silicon for InfiniBand, a decision that Klein describes as economic.
Others in the industry are not so sanguine.
"Intel was more than a year late compared to IBM and Mellanox because they focused too long on the first generation," said Asaf Somekh, director of marketing for Voltaire.
In addition to IBM and Mellanox Technologies of Santa Clara, Calif., two other chipmakers have committed to make InfiniBand-based silicon: Banderacom of Austin, Texas and RedSwitch of Milpitas, Calif. So industry officials aren't concerned that there will be a lack of chips to run InfiniBand. And despite its decision regarding silicon, Intel is still forging ahead on InfiniBand software to enable InfiniBand to work with other Intel products.
Not long after Intel's announcement, Microsoft pulled back from its commitment to implement InfiniBand drivers in the second generation of .Net and has never agreed to implement InfiniBand in its Windows operating system. But again, evangelists aren't deterred. Fiber channel didn't have Microsoft support, they say, and look how well it has done. Besides, analysts say, the software giant has said it will certify the compatibility of other vendors' InfiniBand drivers with its products.
"Some people interpret this as a disaster for InfiniBand," said Turner at IDC. "But the people who build data center infrastructures are more sophisticated than your typical end user. Shipping a driver to be updated by their systems engineers isn't a big deal for them."
So the challenge now for InfiniBand is to prove to technology leaders that it can deliver on its promises.
"Products are finally coming to market at the end of this year, from the silicon to the boards to the systems to the software stacks to the switches," said Hoxie-Wasko at InfiniSwitch. "You need all that to show the benefits to a customer. It's all coming to fruition."
SOURCE: Mass High Tech, October 7, 2002
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