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InfiniBand - scroll down to see InfiniBand market milestones 2000 to present day

... InfiniBand readers click here for storage news
Megabyte was going to catapult himself
into faster motion using infinitely strong
rubber band technology.
The companies listed below have included announcements about InfiniBand in our storage news pages

See also:-

InfiniBand FAQs
Squeak! - the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide
article:- What is the InfiniBand Ecosystem?
article:- Cutting Through the Infiniband Buzz
article:- Will InfiniBand be confined to a niche?
article:- a Short History of Disk to Disk Backup
article:- History of the SPARC Notebook Market
article:- Has Infiniband Established Itself in the Market?
article:- PCI Express and InfiniBand Form a Fruitful Marriage
article:- the Power of InfiniBand and Clustered Storage (pdf)
article:- Centralizing Server I/O Infrastructure with InfiniBand
Solid state disks, Disk to disk backup, RAID systems, Hard disk drives, Memory, storage news
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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 offers real-time resource control for any application across any system.
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.
InfiniBand Companies
FC SAN / iSCSI / NAS / RAID
3Com

Agilent Technologies

Aristos Logic

CATC

Crossroads Systems

Data Direct Networks

Dell Computer

EMC

Enhance Technology

Engenio

Exanet

FalconStor Software

Finisar

Fujitsu

HP

IBM

InfiniBand Trade Association

InfiniCon Systems

InfiniFast

Intel

Isilon Systems

Linux Networx

LSI

Maximum Throughput

Mellanox Technologies

Meritec

Microsoft

Network Appliance

Norco Technologies

QLogic

Scali

SGI

Sun Microsystems

Terrascale Technologies

Texas Memory Systems

VIEO

Voltaire

YottaYotta
still can't find it? check the acquired, dead & renamed list
iSCSI

solid state disks
Solid state disks
low  cost - 3U 12 bay USB / FireWire / SATA / Infiniband  storage
3U 12 bay Infiniband storage
from Norco Technologies

Tera-RamSan - terabyte solid state storage with native InfiniBand
Tera-RamSan Enterprise SSD Array
1 Terabyte of Non-Volatile DDR RAM
from Texas Memory Systems
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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.
  • January 2002 - JNI announced a strategic alliance with InfiniSwitch Corp.
  • 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.
  • January 2005 - STORAGEsearch.com's Solid State Disk Buyer Market Survey showed that InfiniBand came in 9th - cited by just 6% of SSD buyers in response to the question - "Which interfaces best suit your current or future SSD requirements?"
  • 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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