Can Topspin Boot Egenera?: Page 2 of 4

Topspin marketing VP Stu Aaron says the boot-over capability is the first step toward allowing the company's server partners to use InfiniBand for their utility or grid computing platforms. Those partners include IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL), and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), all of which have announced plans to use Topspin gear in their servers (see Dell Joins InfiniBand).

This is the first piece that expands InfiniBand beyond the clustering interconnect space into the world of grid computing," Aaron says. "This allows our system vendor partners to deliver solutions that compete with Egenera. Companies like Egenera have sparked interest in this technology, but customers want to buy from people they trust.”

Ouch. Predictably, Egenera marketing VP Susan Davis doesn't share Aaron's view. “This [boot-over] technology is nothing new to the market, it’s just new to InfiniBand,” Davis says. “We’ve had the ability to boot over SANs for years. The value is about the virtualization services you build above it." She says much more is needed, including software to perform services such as high availability, clustering, disaster recovery, chargeback, and automatic repurposing.

Egenera makes a blade server with its own virtualization software and optional virtualization OEM'd from VMware, now part of EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC). (See Egenera CEO Sticks Up for Startups.)

To put Topspin's technology to best use, OEMs will have to add the necessary software to create a full-scale Egenera-beater. That said, IBM cited virtualization as one of the major selling points when it announced the deal to use Topspin’s InfiniBand switches in January (see IBM Strikes InfiniBand Deal). IBM has been one of the major drivers of InfiniBand and grid computing, so perhaps it's understandable that Topspin is crowing about being first to be able to boot over InfiniBand.