Though the Infiniband spec was unveiled last October, a number of startups, in conjunction with more firmly entrenched companies, have swiftly pulled together the foundation for an Infiniband ecosystem. While some market analysts believe deployment will be slow — due to the revolutionary nature of the bus — many in that ecosystem insist that Infiniband-enabled systems will be on display as soon as Comdex/Fall, with commercially available systems hitting the market around the third quarter of 2002.

"Over the last six months, there's been a real change in the awareness level of Infiniband," said Les Crudele, president and chief executive officer of Banderacom (Austin, Texas). "Most are convinced that this will be an industry standard, that this is inevitable; it's the timing that's a question.

"I think you'll have all the ingredients by the third quarter to start putting something together to show at Comdex," Crudele said. "Just like PCI became a rallying point — and all processor architectures have some mechanism for dealing with PCI — you'll see the same thing happen with Infiniband."

Fresh from a second round of funding that weighed in at $35 million, Banderacom will showcase an Infiniband-to-Fibre Channel target channel adapter (TCA) prototype, developed in conjunction with Qlogic Corp. The TCA looks to demonstrate distributed storage, connectivity to Fibre Channel storage-area networks and connectivity to Ethernet local-area networks. The company will also show a Gigabit Ethernet-to-Infiniband TCP/IP offload platform, developed with Wind River Systems Inc.

"You can use up an entire 1-GHz host processor just doing the TCP/IP stack. So, in the Infiniband world, you want to allow the servers to do something other than keep your Gigabit Ethernet NIC card busy," said Phil Grove, vice president of marketing for Banderacom. "You need to offload the stack to an external processor. One could argue that Infiniband will be what makes TCP/IP offload a really viable approach."

Other alliances

While Banderacom is partnering with software provider Lane15 in many of the conference demos here, Crudele said that Banderacom has also been working with Vieo Inc. and even Microsoft Corp. to proliferate its technology. Its flagship iBandit architecture has four ports, in either four 1x links or one 4x link, an integrated serializer/deserializer, PCI/PCI-X-compliant bus interfaces and a wire speed transaction switch with 200 kbytes of transaction data storage.

Mellanox (Santa Clara, Calif.) will release a slew of products at the conference, similarly charged with giving OEMs more choices in its Infiniband approach. The company will release what it claims is the first platform to support 10-Gbit/second copper connections, as well as the first platform to support small-form-factor pluggable connectors. Both platforms include the Mellanox Software Development Kit.

Eyal Waldman, chief executive officer of Mellanox, said the 10-Gbit/s technology will enable significantly lower infrastructure costs when compared with fiber optics. "Copper transceivers are hundreds of dollars less than fiber-optic transceivers," he said. "We believe this is the first time you have 10-Gbit running on copper — not just for Infiniband, but in any industry." Waldman said Mellanox has already shipped boards and silicon to 45 companies since its inception.

Though system availability may begin to show in the third quarter of next year, many analysts feel that it will take a considerable amount of time for Infiniband to become pervasive. "Don't pull the trigger too fast on Infiniband," said Bert McComas, founder and principal analyst at InQuest Market Research.

"Mellanox has been doing a great job with its first generation of silicon, and some of the software is beginning to show. This effort is more difficult than USB, and USB took two years from the time silicon was available," McComas said.

Because it is an external interface, McComas argued, Infiniband will be of little use until all of its infrastructure arrives. New server chip sets, servers, peripherals, external switches and cabling and a massive software development will all be required, making a 2002 target unreasonable.

Mellanox, however, hopes to speed things up. In all, the company's four new reference platforms target multiple-application development environments, including Infiniband switches and channel adapters for servers, storage, communications, clustering and remote I/O capabilities. The two-port Infiniband channel adapter consists of two 4x (10-Gbit/s) copper Infiniband ports on a half-length PCI interface card, as well as Mellanox's InfiniPCI technology.

The eight-port fiber/copper switch platform consists of eight 1x ports, small-form-factor pluggable connectors that support both fiber and copper, Mellanox's InfiniBridge device and a mezzanine expansion connector. The four-port channel adapter also includes the InfiniBridge device, the InfiniPCI technology, as well as four 1x copper ports on a half-length PCI interface card. The company will also release a four-port channel adapter with external CPU interface. Platform prices range from $4,500 to $8,000, with full availability in the third quarter.

Meanwhile, BMC Software Inc. will begin to carve its stake in the Infiniband ecosystem through a partnership with Vieo. BMC said it would use Vieo's FabricView technology to access Infiniband fabric elements and deliver a management component product. In turn, Vieo will offer that management component to its OEM and VAR customers, while joining BMC's Application-Centric Storage Management Consortium. And underscoring the revolutionary nature of Infiniband, startup InfiniCon Systems will use the IBTA conference to launch its educational campaign.