"Our customers are looking for an alternative supplier. The market will not expand as readily without another card supplier that is fully vertically integrated," said Amit Vashi, vice president of marketing for QLogic's server card group.

Infiniband has been slowly on the rise as a system-to-system interconnect, gaining traction mainly as a link in high performance clusters. As clusters expand to handle more applications, Infiniband has grown, often replacing proprietary links. International Data Corp. pegs the market for Infiniband cards at about $120 million in 2008 rising to nearly $300 million in 2011.

QLogic reports its series 7200 cards are on par with those from Mellanox in terms of raw bandwidth and latency. In some areas, such as their ability to carry as many as 26 million clustering messages per second, they surpass the Mellanox products, QLogic claims. The company also said its products do a superior job of carrying more messages and keeping latency low as users add more systems to a cluster.

The 20 Gbit/s cards, available now, will sell for about $600 to end users. QLogic would not quote volume prices to OEMs.

The cards are the result of QLogic's February 2006 acquisition of startup Pathscale which sold a 2.5 Gbit/s Infiniband card that rode the HyperTransport bus. About 18 months ago, QLogic rolled out a similar card for the PCI Express bus. It's upcoming quad-data-rate card will ride the 5 GHz version of Express.