InfiniBand will become a standard part of server motherboards by 2003, says Peter Urban, a senior analyst at AMR Research, a technology research company in Boston. He notes that Intel’s recently released 64-bit Itanium chip will be the first processor to adopt the technology. Vendors benefiting from the technology include Vieo and Lane15, both in Austin, Texas, which create the software that makes InfiniBand work, as well as server makers that will be able to target more demanding applications. "Manufacturers of open databases, like Oracle, should also see performance improvements as the pipe between shared disks and nodes is fattened," Urban says.

For CIOs, InfiniBand’s prime benefit will be greater computing capacity from comparable resources?or equivalent capacity from fewer resources?because of a reduction in data-traffic congestion among hardware devices. The technology would also simplify a data center’s infrastructure by presenting a common fabric to interconnect server, switch and storage components. "In doing so, the data center’s operations dramatically improve its total cost of ownership," Turner says.

How much money will InfiniBand save its adopters? "This is hard to quantify today, since there are no benchmark or performance metrics to compare to," Turner says. Still, the technology’s raw power?scalable transfer rates of 500MBps to 6GBps, compared to PCI’s 132MBps to 1GBps pace?leads experts to believe that for most adopters the overall savings will be substantial. Urban believes that InfiniBand will be a better value than the status quo. "You get faster performing servers, which will translate to faster performing applications and better e-commerce," he says.

For all of its power, InfiniBand has a price that isn’t expected to reach to infinity. Although it’s too early to project system costs, InfiniBand technology isn’t expected to significantly drive up server hardware prices, especially considering the performance advantages. "The pricing can’t be excessive," says Urban.

With Closed Arms

Despite the growing hoopla surrounding InfiniBand, not everyone is welcoming the technology with open arms. Organizations with substantial investments in what will soon become legacy servers and related hardware are viewing the technology with a combination of skepticism and concern. "InfiniBand has the capability of being classed as a disruptive technology, causing paradigm shifts in the way we look at the three primary components of servers, storage and networks," says IDC’s Turner.

One way that InfiniBand would disrupt the status quo is by supplanting an entire range of established standards. Besides PCI, InfiniBand promises to displace such familiar technologies as PCIx (an enhanced PCI bus), iSCSI (a storage networking protocol) and fibre channel (a storage networking standard). Businesses have made substantial investments in those technologies and will be reluctant to ditch them. Although InfiniBand servers may be able to work with some legacy products as soon as middleware vendors develop the necessary solutions, the new technology still represents a quantum change for CIOs and their staffs.