Three of the top four server sellers are rallying around InfiniBand, giving a shot in the arm to a high-speed networking technology that"s suffered recent setbacks.
IBM, Sun Microsystems and Dell Computer took to the campaign trail this week, announcing that they see an important if scaled-back, role for the technology in their servers. Hewlett-Packard, however, is linking its InfiniBand adoption on widespread customer interest.
IBM in the first quarter of 2003 will begin installing InfiniBand-connected groups of computers for housing databases and performing high-speed calculations. Dell agrees with that approach, while Sun is building InfiniBand into its entire product line.
"We believe we"re at the point in time where the technology is maturing," said Subodh Bapat, chief technology officer for Sun"s lower-end servers. "We believe it will offer some compelling performance improvement for the next generation of data center applications."