Intel and Microsoft absquatulate! Is all hope lost for InfiniBand? - Industry Overview

Computer Technology Review, August, 2002 by Christine Taylor Chudnow

InfiniBand has been hammered lately by Intel's and Microsoft's withdrawal from active InfiniBand development. Reporters and investors have loudly questioned InfiniBand's very survival--but, frankly, that's way too dramatic for the real story. Intel's and Microsoft's withdrawals are significant because they confirm what many developers already believed--that InfiniBand's market would not be the high-volume, mid-tier server space, but in data centers as a high-speed interconnect fabric directly hooking into CPU memory. The companies who put their money on InfiniBand as a high-end data interconnect were not too worried at the twin pullouts, though others who were developing around lower-end InfiniBand roadmaps are feeling the squeeze.

InfiniBand No Longer Network-Wide Bus Replacement

InfiniBand combines silicon chips and management software to transport large amounts of data at very high speeds. It is a channel-based, switched-fabric architecture that scales from 500MB/sec to 6GB/sec per link. It's meant to counter bottlenecks between server-to-server and server-to-storage connections by residing at both the host server and the server's storage targets. InfiniBand is particularly suited to clustering environments, since current clustering technology is often built on architectures that were never created to support clustered environments. For example, Ethernet-based clusters do not prioritize traffic across complex distributed networks, and developers must work their clustering software around these limitations. InfiniBand can enable high-speed system clusters by providing fast communications between nodes and a solid infrastructure for data movement. How fast? It offers a throughput of up to 2.5GB/sec and can support up to 64,000 addressable devices. InfiniBand originally grew out of two different designs: Future I/O, developed by Compaq, IBM, and HP; and Next Generation I/O, developed by Intel, Microsoft, and Sun.

With both Intel and Microsoft championing the first instances of InfiniB and, their withdrawal does impact the InfiniBand space. It signals the fact that InfiniBand will no longer be a network-wide bus replacement, the vision long held by the two companies. Intel was working on InfiniBand chips, concentrating on putting the soupedup chips on the motherboard and selling the faster machines as clustered servers do. However, their development roadmap lost ground to the first wave of InfiniB and introductions, which followed another path entirely: InfiniBand as a high-speed interconnect fabric in busy corporate data centers and clusters, with physical and software components distributed throughout the fabric. Intel had hoped to introduce its InfiniB and vision first in order to identify the market with its name. With market buy-in solidly behind it, Intel could afford to continue developing an InfiniBandenabled motherboard. Failing that, Intel stopped production and turned back to its 3G10 efforts, now renamed P CI Express.

Startups Smarting

From the beginning, Intel had preferred the lower-speed lx version of InfiniBand, although most other developers preferred a higher-speed 4x transport. Intel's idea was to replace the old PCI bus with InfiniBand, but that old technology stumbled back to Life with updated PCI-X and PCI Express. PCI Express is focused on signals that are contained on a single system .n a single enclosure. It focuses on signals that cross a span f inches between the processor and the nearest components. (The Hypertransport architecture is more its competitor than InfiniBand.) Intel hopes that PCI Express would do what Intel had hoped InfiniBand would do: allow it to soup up its chips to create more powerful microprocessors for Intel-based clusters.

Although Intel insists it still supports InfiniBand (it even uses the word "wholeheartedly") its move did not inspire confidence in technology investors. When Intel canceled its chip-development program, many investors felt they were left holding a $750 million bag: money already invested in InfiniBand startups like Mellanox, Banderacom and Lanel5 Software. However, the Intel move hardly spells doom for all companies, especially for those who are already funded through product completion and who had targeted their InfiniBand development efforts towards high-end data centers. Many of those investors felt doubly shaken at Microsoft's withdrawal announcement, which followed Intel's. Microsoft reported that they preferred to concentrate on development dollars on Gigabit Ethernet, which the company says addresses a higher range of server capabilities without the additional software and management expenses of InfiniBand. As with Intel, the impact is not as great as it might appear-third party InfiniBand support wil l be perfectly welcome in Windows and .NET environments.

Chris Wildermuth, director of strategic marketing at JNI, commented that Intel's withdrawal will not impact JNI's development at all, which was already centered around high-end data center interconnects. JNI's interest is "different from what the conventional interest is. When we first announced our products, we saw that InfiniBand is a data center product serving clustering." InfiniBand retains great opportunities, but perhaps not the opportunities Intel envisioned when they got into the business. Wildermuthadded, "Intel really saw this as a method to create a new connection environment directly to their process, to allow better scaling and clustering to occur. They saw this as a successor to the PCI bus."