And any dreams of an InfiniBand invasion of the SAN space have long since evaporated. "Any storage person who tells you InfiniBand is going to catch on in storage is either being paid to say that or is a damn fool," says one damn industry analyst, who asked to remain unnamed.
Storage aside, observers say that there is still potentially a bright future for InfiniBand in the realm of linking multiple servers into super-fast, low-latency, and low-cost database clusters. "InfiniBand today can provide up to 10x improvement in those categories versus Gigabit Ethernet," Professor Assaf Schuster, the head of the distributed computing lab at the Technion-Israel Institute, writes in an email. "This huge difference is translated to great benefit at the application level when deploying large, tightly coupled clusters."
Adds Schuster, "The general impression is that they provide very high performance, as well as a comprehensive solution."
Voltaire says that the InfiniBand silence following the deafening boom of the bursting bubble does not mean that the technology has lost its appeal. "Theres a lot of [InfiniBand] activity being done in... our partner companies," says Asaf Somekh, Voltaires director of marketing. "Today, there's a lot less talk, but a lot more being done."
IBM, it's true, did recently voice its support for the technology, and said it planned to launch a complete line of 4x (10-Gbit/s) InfiniBand HCA switches, along with fabric management software for its Intel-based server lines by the end of this quarter (see Server Vendors Hold IB Pep Rally).
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
