Recently, Infiniband has managed to rise out of the morass of high-speed interconnect technologies. No longer being compared with chip-to-chip interconnects like PCI-X, 3GIO, RapidIO and HyperTransport, Infiniband is emerging as a robust board-to-board and interchassis connection technology. The hype has ended and gradual adoption is kicking in.
Rather than competing with the chip-to-chip interconnects, Infiniband will more commonly complete with switched Ethernet in interchassis communication environments. This is especially true for network-attached storage, where Ethernet should maintain a healthy lead. However, Infiniband will dominate in a much more significant market. Infiniband's powerful protocol stack makes it a compelling technology for server clustering, an application in which Ethernet's limited frame size and lower bandwidth are too costly.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation might define the size of the Infiniband-specific semiconductor opportunity in 2005. First, let's start with the number of servers that will be shipped worldwide in 2005-about 6.67 million. Next, assume that about 19 percent of these servers will end up in clustered environments, yielding 1.27 million clustered servers. A conservative assumption is that 27 percent of these clustered servers will be linked using Infiniband. This gives 340,000 clustered Infiniband servers shipped in 2005.
Figuring in another 340,000 server-to-storage nodes and a smattering of 68,000 Infiniband-to-Fibre Channel bridge nodes yields a total of 778,000 Infiniband end nodes. With 30 percent of end nodes deployed as 1x with Infiniband silicon content of $27 per node, and 70 percent as 4x with Infiniband silicon content of $52/node, the end-node silicon total available market (TAM) is approximately $35 million.
Finally, we need to factor in Infiniband switch ports. A fair ratio, derived from the Fibre Channel world, is five switch ports deployed for every end node. Doing the math with $19 of Infiniband semiconductor content with 1x nodes and $38 for 4x nodes gives a switch silicon TAM of $125 million. So, a reasonable estimate for the Infiniband semiconductor TAM in 2005 is $150 million, a figure that should more than double in 2006. Though this is not a large number, it is a conservative lower bound and should support the limited current number of merchant Infiniband silicon vendors.
Jeremey Donovan (jeremey.donovan@gartner.com) is a Principal Analyst at Gartner Dataquest.
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