InfiniBand, first
mentioned here on STORAGEsearch.com
in June 2000,
has been a graveyard for many startups which came into being to support this
technology.
The original idea behind InfiniBand was that it would
offer an industry standard alternative to the many high speed proprietary busses
which server manufacturers used to cluster their most powerful servers.
The
technology delivers 10 to 40Gps remote
RAM access with very low
latency.
The server
recession in 2001-2003
slowed down the pace of new server developments and provided a disincentive for
manufacturers to end of life their most profitable products.
2 other
factors have reduced the potential market size for InfiniBand.
(1) -
The availability of processor chips with multiple central processing units on
the same chip has reduced the need for motherboard to motherboard memory access
of the type provided by a factor of 2, 4 or 8 - for different chip
implementations.
(2) - The availability of 10Gbps Ethernet, and the
imminent 20GbE, provides a workable alternative in many blade to blade and box
to box interconnect applications which would have looked like natural slots for
InfiniBand when it was first proposed.
How Big is the InfiniBand
Market?
In September 2006 the
InfiniBand
Trade Association estimated that over 500 end-user sites had deployed
InfiniBand products in production applications. |
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LSI and QLogic Cross
Certify InfiniBand Products
MILPITAS,
Calif - February 12, 2008 - QLogic Corp. and LSI Corp today
announced that the 2 companies will be working together to cross-certify their
InfiniBand based products.
LSI is actively involved in the QLogic
HPCtrack Program in which
InfiniBand companies
collaborate to optimize the performance of multi-vendor solutions.
...LSI profile,
...QLogic profile
DataDirect Scales to X00 Gigabytes/ Second
Chatsworth,
Calif - November 14, 2007 - DataDirect Networks Inc. today announced
that the company's 8th generation S2A appliance will enable CFS/SUN's
Lustre I/O to reach several hundred gigabytes / second.
DataDirect Networks manufactures the fastest, highest capacity, most scalable
Lustre-based storage systems on the planet. Lustre, taken from the words "Linux"
and "cluster," is a distributed file system used for large scale
cluster computing. The file system, which was
acquired by
Sun Microsystems in
October, was designed to scale to tens of thousands of nodes that are attached
to petabytes of storage. The main advantage of the file system is that it does
not compromise a storage system's speed or security.
New features
built into the latest S2A appliance include support for
8Gbps Fibre Channel and
20Gbps Infiniband
DDR host connections. The system leverages the
serial attached SCSI
protocol to communicate to the drives it manages, providing a future-proof
roadmap to the latest disk drive technologies, speeds and capacities. ...Data Direct Networks
profile, SAN
switches, Record
Breaking Storage
Violin will Demo InfiniBand Memory Array
at SC07
Iselin,
NJ - October 24, 2007 - Violin Memory, Inc. will exhibit the
Violin 1010 Memory Appliance at SC07 in Reno, NV next month.
The Violin1010 will be network attached to the SCinet
InfiniBand network
during the show. The network technologies and partners to enable this attachment
will be announced at the tradeshow. ...Violin Memory profile,
Storage Events
QLogic Shows Faster SAN Glue at SNW
SNW,
DALLAS - October 16, 2007 - QLogic Corp today announced several new
high-performance storage networking products.
- First end-to-end family of 8Gbps
Fibre Channel adapters
and switches.
- Low cost 2U 20Gbps InfiniBand
switch - the SilverStorm 9020.
- The industry's first FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) network
adapters.
The technology is designed for "the new data center"
- which consists of densely consolidated servers and storage resulting from the
deployment of virtualization, blade servers and multi-core processors. QLogic
says its new technology will provide the performance, quality-of-service and
green networking needed in these "High RPM" data centers. ...QLogic profile
Editor's
comments:- I like the phrase "High RPM data center." But the
fastest disks are "zero RPM".
Voltaire Reports 194% Revenue Growth
HERZELIYA, Israel
- August 8, 2007 - Voltaire Ltd. today announced financial results for
the 3 month period ended June 30, 2007.
Revenue increased by 194% to $11.7 million compared to Q206.
"This has been another strong quarter for Voltaire"
said Ronnie Kenneth, Chairman and CEO. "During the quarter we shipped our
new 20Gbps switch platform and continued to penetrate growth-oriented vertical
markets..."
...Voltaire profile
QLogic's InfiniBand HCAs outSPEC the Rest
ALISO
VIEJO, Calif - July 17, 2007 - QLogic Corp today announced that its
InfiniBand adapters are the fastest based on a new benchmark suite just
released by SPEC.
The
SPEC MPI2007 suite measures the
performance of message-passing interface applications and can be used to
compare different hardware architectures, inter-connects, processors, memory
hierarchy, compilers, and MPI implementations.
"Unlike micro-benchmarks,
SPEC MPI2007 is
very real-world, measuring performance based on a suite of actual end-user
applications," said Amit Vashi, VP of marketing, QLogic Host Solutions
Group. "HPC customers now have further validation that our InfiniBand HCAs
outperform competitive products, hands down."
...QLogic profile,
Storage ORGs,
Record Breaking
Storage
Mellanox Announces InfiniBand Market Milestone
editor- May
21, 2007 - Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. today announced that it has
shipped over 2 million InfiniBand (10 and 20Gb/s) ports to OEMs.
More
than 6 years after STORAGEsearch.com
launched a dedicated directory page for
InfiniBand in
May 2001 most
users have forgotten just how much this technology was once hyped.
For
example IDC was once
quoted as saying "75% of all servers shipped in 2004 will be
shipped with InfiniBand connectivity." In fact that estimate was 100x
too high. The need for InfiniBand functionality didn't go away - instead it
was mostly implemented by on chip memory to memory access in multi-core
processors. 10GbE also took a swipe out of the inter blade connection market. So
today, InfiniBand is a small niche market instead of being the dominant
technology which was once foretold.
Mellanox Demos 40Gb/s Connectivity Over
Copper
SANTA CLARA,
CA – April 16, 2007 – Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced
the demonstration of a 40Gb/s InfiniBand server-to-server connection over a
copper cable using advanced versions of the recently announced ConnectX IB Host
Channel Adapter.
These are the first I/O adapters to support the
increased performance of PCI Express 2.0 – a doubling of bus speeds
expected to be integrated in server and storage platforms over the next year.
"This 40Gb/s demonstration is strong evidence that
InfiniBand will
continue to provide connectivity performance leadership for the industry's most
demanding computing and storage applications, and it's software compatible with
the InfiniBand installed base," said Shai Cohen, Mellanox's VP of
operations and engineering at Technologies.
...Mellanox profile,
Record Breaking
Storage
InfiniBand Storage Powers Moviemakers
Los Angeles, CA
- March 27, 2007 - DataDirect Networks announced today that Academy
Award winning Ascent Media Creative Services has selected its
technology (incorporated in SGI's RM660 and Infinite 6700) as the
primary storage solution supporting 4K, 2K and HD post production and digital
intermediate workflow.
SGI's
RM660
and Infinite 6700
systems are based on DataDirect Networks'
Silicon
Storage Appliance technology and is an ideal storage solution for creative
environments. The S2A technology, with up to 3GB/s of sustained real-time
throughput and up to 960TB of storage capacity, can easily scale to handle the
bandwidth and capacity intensive requirements needed in the digital intermediate
space, empowering true real-time collaborative workflow in digital
post-production. ...Data
Direct Networks profile, ...SGI
profile, InfiniBand |
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 |
Quorum - High
Availability and Workload
Management appliance from
Themis Computer
Manage upto
50 servers in real-time, any application,
any server with 1 simple
interface. | | |
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| Charting
the Rise of the InfiniBand Market (2000 to 2007) |
This
timeline tracks key InfiniBand events and market milestones, as they were
recorded here on STORAGEsearch.
See also:-
Google Trends - InfiniBand
- June 2000 -
first mention of InfiniBand. Hubert Yoshida, Vice President of Data Network
Solutions at Hitachi Data Systems " ...As very large-capacity disk drives
come to market for future generations of storage subsystems, these disk drives
themselves may become bottlenecks to system performance... Adopting dual-ported
Fibre Channel interface technology is the way to get faster back-end performance
out of systems using the large disk drives... Infiniband standards, which are
now being defined, bring the concept of switching into the processors to replace
the shared PCI bus."
- January 2001 -
Intel announced it was shipping samples of its InfiniBand silicon and software
products, critical components that will help implement the InfiniBand I/O
industry specification and enable a key advance in Internet servers.
- February 2001 -
Mellanox Technologies introduced its InfiniBridge family of devices supporting
the new InfiniBand architecture which includes Switches, Host Channel Adapters
(HCAs), and Target Channel Adapters
- February 2001 -
first STORAGEsearch editor article mentioning InfiniBand. Re: Does a SAN need to
include fibre-channel? - "To my way of thinking, circa 2001, "SAN"
now encompasses the idea of any kind of significant storage system which can
connect over some distance to a network, whether that connection is by
fibre-channel, ethernet, the internet, or in the future InfiniBand... I think
the SAN market today is like the PC market before Microsoft, and the networking
market before Cisco. Nobody really knows who is going to create the standards
which are going to be the winners."
- April 2001 -
DAFS - a new file access protocol, specifically designed to take advantage of
standard memory-to-memory interconnect technologies such as InfiniBand in
high-performance clustered data center environments - was 75% defined.
- April 2001 -
Paceline Systems
became the first of many hopeful InfiniBand focused startups - and raised $20
million in financing from top-tier venture capitalists. "IDC predicts the
InfiniBand switch port opportunity will exceed $1 billion by 2004."
- May 2001 -
STORAGEsearch started a dedicated directory for
InfiniBand (this
page). "Infiniband was one of the top 5 words or phrases searched using the
on-site search-engine during the month preceding."
- June 2001 -
InfiniCon Systems published first of a series of educational articles about
InfiniBand.
- June 2001 -
InfiniSwitch quoted a market projection "Research from IDC estimates that
more than 75% of all servers shipped in 2004 will be shipped with
InfiniBand connectivity." - Most of IDC's projections about storage
interface technologies at that time were much too optimistic. This resulted in
many startup companies going bust in later years - because the markets in
InfiniBand (and iSCSI -
the other big analyst hyped subject) weren't big enough to feed them.
- August 2001 -
Intel announced several interoperability demos including the world's largest
InfiniBand fabric to date, which featured 24 vendors and over 100 InfiniBand
devices.
- October 2001 -
InfiniCon Systems announced that it will work with IBM to integrate IBM's
InfiniBand chip technology - known as InfiniBlue - into sharable I/O solutions
to be offered by InfiniCon Systems.
- February 2002 -
Voltaire demonstrated its TCP Termination product architecture - which connected
InfiniBand to existing IP networks
- March 2002 - we
started seeing the first of the InfiniBand startups go bust. The assets of
Essential Communications were acquired by
SBS Technologies
Also
in March 28, 2002
- Overland Data, Inc announced a strategic alliance with InfiniCon Systems to
collaborate on InfiniBand-based solutions for Overland's Neo series tape
libraries.
- May 2002 - On its first anniversary - the
InfiniBand directory on STORAGEsearch.com was ranked #24 out of the pages viewed
by readers. Just below disk to
disk backup.
- July
2002 - view this InfiniBand page and news back in time.
- September 2002
- InfiniCon Systems announced general availability of its InfinIO 7000 Shared
I/O Systems - the first commercially available I/O system based on InfiniBand
using 10Gbps channel speed.
- May 2003 - On its second anniversary - the
InfiniBand directory on STORAGEsearch.com was ranked #39 out of the pages viewed
by readers. In the same month
SATA was #1.
- May 2003 - first
vendor independent InfiniBand training workshops launched by CATC and
Dashcourses.
- August 2003 -
InfiniCon Systems announced that its InfinIO family of products - leveraging
InfiniBand architecture - using the industry-standard IP-over-InfiniBand
(IPoIB) protocol, applications drove data in excess of 350MB/second for a single
link, compared to an average of 65MB/second for a Gigabit Ethernet link.
- November 2003 -
SBS Technologies introduced the IB4X-PMC-2 Host Channel Adapter - the first
InfiniBand HCA to be provided on a PCI mezzanine card (PMC).
- February 2004 -
Mellanox announced that more than 200,000 InfiniBand ports have been shipped
to its customers.
- March 2004 -
Topspin Communications announced the industry's first intelligent Boot over
InfiniBand solution.
- May 2004 - On its third anniversary - the
InfiniBand directory on STORAGEsearch.com was ranked #36 out of the pages viewed
by readers. In the same month solid
state disks was #1.
Also in May 2004 wannabe InfiniBand
startup Banderacom (which had exited the InfiniBand market due to its small
size and poor prospects) renamed itself and re-emerged as
NetEffect - with $22
million to pursue the high-performance, multi-gigabit Ethernet market.
- June 2004 -
IWILL selected Mellanox's InfiniHost host channel adapter to provide 10Gb/s
Landed on Motherboard connections for the DK8S2-IB server platform - the
world's first server with 10Gb/s network connectivity shipped standard with
every system.
- December 2004 -
Infiniband was identified as one of the storage market "Dogs Which Didn't
Bark" in STORAGEsearch.com's end of year review.
- May 2005 - On its fourth anniversary - the
InfiniBand directory on STORAGEsearch.com was ranked #31 out of the pages viewed
by readers. In the same month NAS
was #1.
- June 2005 -
Voltaire announced $15 million in further financing taking its total to $65
million investment. STORAGEsearch commented on InfiniBand's slower than
predicted adoption in the market. "The original benefit of a faster
storage connection has got more fuzzy as other technologies have also speeded
up. It's also possible that new technologies like multi-core processors in which
CPUs share access to the same memory bus inside the same chip have eroded some
of the multiprocessing benefits which InfiniBand's proponents originally had in
mind."
- October 2005 - InfiniBand is 33rd most popular
subject viewed by STORAGEsearch.com's readers.
- June 2006 -
Voltaire ships
InfiniBand-based switching solution and software stack to support Microsoft
Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (Microsoft's official new entry into the
world of HPC).
- October 2006 - InfiniBand is 28th most popular
subject viewed by STORAGEsearch.com's readers.
- November 2006 - InfiniBand (re)entered the top 20
storage searches by STORAGEsearch.com readers - at #18
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