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| Dr. VPNlabs Question (Archived) |
| toby sterling |
posted: 2001-11-12 10:30:31
Thought you might find this article
interesting...
Tobias
* This article
is from the 2001-11-2001 issue of Red
Herring
magazine. *
Infiniband, a technology long
under development, has become
a cause celebre
in the venture capital community. Ten
startups,
including Banderacom, InfiniSwitch,
Lane15,
Mellanox Technologies, and VIEO, are
chasing opportunities
offered by this pubescent
technology and have raised more
than $250
million in the past 18 months.
Infiniband,
short for ""infinite bandwidth,"" is a new type
of
input/output architecture that helps tie
together servers,
network devices, and storage
devices. The architecture,
backed by a cadre of
high-power equipment makers like IBM
(NYSE:
IBM) and Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), transfers data
at
significantly higher speeds than the
peripheral component
interconnect (PCI) bus
technology currently used in
many
PCs.
While PCI is capable of
carrying one message at a time,
infiniband can
handle hundreds or thousands of messages at
a
time, at speeds of up to 2.5 Gbps. These
speeds are achieved
using infiniband chips in
servers, storage devices, and
network hardware,
and through software that manages
data
transfers. Another key difference between
the aging PCI bus
and infiniband is that
infiniband can be used over distances
as great
as 50 feet, while PCI is restricted to just a
few
feet. As a result, infiniband-based storage
devices can be
placed far away from servers,
allowing servers with just
microprocessors and
memory to be stacked much more densely.
This
reduces the footprint of servers and allows
data
centers to use space and equipment far
more efficiently.
In addition, infiniband
is likely to make managing data
centers easier.
Unlike today, when a processor failure
means
replacing the whole server, in the future
when one processor
fails, the next one can take
over, and network managers can
swap out the bad
part for a good one.
By 2004, more than 4
million server shipments -- nearly 80
percent
of the market -- will be infiniband
enabled,
according to the research firm
IDC.
INFINITE RESOURCE
""Infiniband
allows you to package a server in a
different
way,"" says Kevin Deierling, vice
president of product
marketing at Mellanox, a
Santa Clara, California, company
that is
developing chips to be used in devices
like
infiniband switches, routers, and even
cards that can be
plugged into storage
arrays.
Atiq Raza, chairman and CEO of Raza
Foundries and a believer
in infiniband, is
sanguine about his investment in Mellanox; |
|
