“Standard will create high-speed system clusters and SANs.”
“System bus technologies are beginning to reach their limits in
terms of speed. Common PCI buses can only support up to 133 Mbps
across all PCI slots, and even with the 64-bit, 66 MHz buses
available in high-end PC servers, 566 Mbps of shared bandwidth is
the most a user can hope for. To counter this, a new standard based
on switched serial links to device groups and devices is currently
in development. Called InfiniBand, the standard is actually a
merged proposal of two earlier groups: Next Generation I/O (NGIO)
led by Intel, Microsoft, and Sun; and Future I/O, supported by
Compaq, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard.”
“InfiniBand provides a scalable solution to the
ever-increasing bandwidth demands of server systems.”
“Whether you’re a proponent or opponent to the InfiniBand
technology, it will be coming. With so many leading vendors betting
the future of their hardware platforms on it, it’s likely to become
a mainstay of the enterprise network of the coming years. The final
version of the standard will emerge sometime this year, while
initial products are targeted for release in 2001.”