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Sanmina Relights InfiniBand Fire

Amid the rollercoaster ride of largely negative InfiniBand news over the past year, contract manufacturer Sanmina-SCI Corp. (Nasdaq: SANM) has been steadfastly working behind the scenes on a turnkey InfiniBand offering (see Sanmina Readies InfiniBand Line).

Sanmina, a Fortune 500 corporation, is a key manufacturing supplier to IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL), Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ). In the InfiniBand space, Sanmina will own the intellectual property to the technology but rebrand it under the name of its OEM customers. The company is building everything from InfiniBand switches and host channel adapters (HCAs) to enclosures and cables.

"We call it InfiniBand-in-a-box," says Greg Thompson, program director for InfiniBand products at Sanmina. However, he was cagey about product details or roadmaps, as Sanmina's offerings are closely tied up with the plans of its server manufacturer customers, apparently. Thompson expects announcements from its OEM partners by this summer.

According to an industry insider familiar with the InfiniBand market, who requested anonymity, Sanmina is poised to be a major provider in the IB space. "It's a good bet that Sanmina's announcement foreshadows the true beginning of InfiniBand adoption among Tier 1 OEMs," he says.

How's that, then? When InfiniBand has been InfiniBroken for the past year?

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