Oracle Takes Stake in Infiniband Vendor Mellanox

IDG News Service — Oracle (ORCL) announced late Wednesday that it has taken a 10.2 percent stake in Mellanox Technologies, maker of Infiniband interconnects for servers and storage systems.

Mellanox's InfiniBand technologies were already being used in Oracle's growing line of high-performance appliances, which include the Exadata database machine and Exalogic, a large-scale application server announced at the recent OpenWorld conference.

The move is a boost for Infiniband, which has been growing in popularity for high-end computing systems.

The Yokneam, Israel, vendor had been a rumored acquisition target for Oracle in recent weeks, but apparently that scenario will not immediately unfold.

Oracle's stake "is for investment purposes only, to solidify common interest in the future of InfiniBand," according to a statement. "Oracle has no plan or intention to make an unsolicited and unfriendly offer to take over Mellanox."

While Oracle's Solaris is to become a "core supported operating system" for Mellanox, the company plans to continue working with other hardware vendors such as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and IBM (IBM).