Emerging Technology: The Truth Behind InfiniBand

CIO — It isn’t every day that a new technology arrives that promises to boost connections to dazzling speeds, shrink the size of servers and perhaps even ease California’s power crisis. And it certainly isn’t every day that hardware and software vendors work together on a specification. Perhaps that’s why InfiniBand?the result of a collaborative effort?isn’t just any technology. "It’s definitely something big," says Tom Macdonald, general manager of Intel’s Hillsboro, Ore.-based advanced components division.

Something big is what the InfiniBand Trade Association?a 225-company consortium formed by Compaq Computer, Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems?had in mind last October when it ratified a specification that calls for removing I/O from individual machines and distributing it across a switched fabric. "The association wanted to create a network bus for the 21st century," says Jim Bowers, a product manager at IBM’s microelectronics unit in Burlington, Vt.

InfiniBand is designed to replace the nearly decade-old PCI bus?a shared, general purpose interconnect?with a connection that can juggle several messages simultaneously and transmit each as if full network resources were devoted to it. InfiniBand’s supporters boast that the technology can eliminate the data flow bottleneck that’s inherent in the PCI bus and allow Internet data centers to take advantage of the new era of high-speed networks. Advocates also note that InfiniBand allows administrators to hook multiple servers together so that they can work as one?boosting performance and promoting efficiency. "Clearly the PCI bus is running out of steam," remarks Dan Tanner, a senior analyst of storage and storage management for the Aberdeen Group, a Boston-based technology market research company.

But before InfiniBand can work any of its promised miracles, it must overcome several critical hurdles. These obstacles include the firmly entrenched technologies that would be replaced by Infini-Band, interoperability problems and a widespread?though largely unspoken? feeling among many CIOs that the status quo is good enough. "The killer application is not as clear-cut as one would hope," says Vernon Turner, vice president of global enterprise server solutions at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC (a sister company to CIO’s publisher, CXO Media). "Yet the benefits and advantages are all there to be discovered."

Banquet of Features

While most new technologies provide only a handful of benefits, InfiniBand promises an entire smorgasbord of new features and enhancements. Some of the tempting advantages include a fast and scalable transfer rate, intelligent channel adapters that offload much of the communications processing workload from the system’s processor, a modular design that can cut hardware costs, remote access capabilities for linking to distant customers and suppliers, and improved load sharing management. Other features that allow IT departments to easily work with an array of transport media include virtually unlimited network expansion as well as direct support for copper, optical and printed circuit wiring.

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