Initially targeting dense data center server clustering, Infiniband technology has continued to gather momentum and support. Mellanox Technologies Ltd. (Santa Clara, Calif.), one of only three silicon providers — along with Intel and Banderacom — with available Infiniband products will announce on Monday (March 12) the interoperability of Intel's and its own silicon.

Mellanox also achieved interoperability at IDF with software providers VIEO, Prisa Networks and Lane15 Software, as well as with test devices from Finisar, Computer Access Technology Corp. and Agilent Technologies.

"This is a significant milestone, when you look at what people were worried about with Infiniband, regarding interoperability," said Eyal Waldman, chief executive officer of Mellanox. "Clearly, this standard is not repeating the Fibre Channel chaos, which took years, and even now, not everything is interoperable there."

Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing for Mellanox, suggested that interoperability would promote the standard. "The Infiniband Trade Association is really a bunch of companies that are competing against each other," he said. "We all know that it has to happen quickly, for the betterment of the Infiniband ecosystem."

That ecosystem looks to be growing, as Intel begins to license its product development and Port Logic design kits. Agere Systems said this week that it would license Intel's Port Logic design kit, one of the first companies to do so, to ensure smooth interoperability between its Infiniband serialiser/deserialiser products and products from Intel and others.

Banderacom, Lane15 Software and Wind River Systems demonstrated a prototype of an Infiniband Ethernet router target channel adapter at the IDF, the first of its kind. The Ethernet target system demonstration used an Infiniband TCA built on Banderacom's IBandit prototype chip set, a Target Development Software Suite running VxWorks software by Wind River, and Lane15's Fabric Manager and Management Agent prototypes.

Crossroads Systems Inc. (Austin, Texas) demonstrated Fibre Channel routing over Infiniband at the IDF, showcasing a connection between Infiniband and Fibre Channel storage-area networks (SANs). The demo linked Crossroads' intelligent storage routers, Computer Associates International's Unicenter TNG and Intel's Infiniband fabric components, while another demo from Crossroads showcased the concept of server-free backup, something the company had demonstrated at the Fall 2000 IDF.

"The standardization around the core, around how these devices communicate, allows a tremendous amount of innovation on what type of products get built, and the capabilities they'll be able to bring," said Jim Pappas, director of initiative marketing for Intel. Though many have noted that the Infiniband architecture has long legs, and can be used for a variety of different applications, Intel is focused on building the Infiniband infrastructure out for front-end server deployment first.

"There's a hundred other reasons why this technology could be successful, but the initial problem we're trying to solve is scaling Internet data centers," Pappas said. "Once Infiniband is successful in that region, there's many, many applications of Infiniband."

Demo draws laughs

While the interoperability labs at IDF were successful, the first public showing of Infiniband was embarrassingly marred. At the Thursday (March 1) keynote at IDF, Mike Fister, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Platforms Group at Intel, sought to demonstrate both failover — the ability to unplug a connection while two end points remain connected — and hot expansion. Both are key points to Infiniband's charm. But both of those demonstrations mysteriously failed, causing both Fister and his on-stage demonstration colleagues to good-naturedly absorb a hall full of laughter.

"Sometimes server demos are boring," Fister joked. "Now you can see when they're not. Maybe we tried to do too much. What we tried to do in two weeks is simulate all the front, middle and back tier stuff through a set of complex transactions."

Perhaps as damage control, Fister touted Lane15's ability to port its management software — onto the first Infiniband silicon the company had ever seen — in the span of just 24 hours. "I think it's a testimony to the breadth and attention to detail that the specification committee went to," Fister said, regarding Lane15.

But the glut of interoperability announcements flooding in and around IDF served at least to quell some industry fears that critical components of the infrastructure, namely software, wouldn't be ready when called upon. In addition to VIEO and Lane15, a company called Prisa Networks Inc., a supplier of network-management software for SANs, partnered with VIEO to demonstrate how its VirtualSAN network manager software interoperates with VIEO's Fabric Manager and Infiniband hardware.

"That core development of the software had to do with the disaggregation of the server, and moving the storage out into a fabric network, and that's all happened," said Deierling of Mellanox, referring to Prisa's porting of its SAN software to Infiniband. "All of this higher-level management software I think maps really well to Infiniband, and I think that starts to address one of the concerns people have as to how fast this will roll out."

While industry watchers debate just when, and to what degree, Infiniband will dominate server design, the inflection point for the switch-fabric architecture may have been slightly sped up this past week, in its quest to replace shared buses.

"Whether it happens two or five or ten years from now, most people conclude that there's an inevitable migration away from shared buses," said Intel's Pappas. "I think the vast majority of servers will continue with shared buses, and will also incorporate Infiniband, and customers will decide what the time frame is for moving from one interface to another."