VARs strike up the Infiniband

Infiniband technology offers great potential to channel players and end-users alike in the storage sector, claims Paul Hickingbotham

The future of the storage market looks strong, with a number of technologies emerging to take advantage of increased demand for data retention and back-up, in response to commercial and legislative pressures. Yet few developments can match the potential offered by Infiniband.

As an interconnect technology Infiniband has been around for some time, yet has been focused on the high performance computing (HPC) sector and served by specialists. Having successfully established itself in this market, it now looks set to extend into other areas.

As a high-speed, point-to-point technology, Infiniband is designed to deliver greater bandwidth, removing the bottlenecks in data-intensive applications including streaming video and 3D modelling.

Compared with today’s relatively slow internal data flow systems, Infiniband-based solutions are easier to manage and offer greatly improved performance, lower latency and built-in security.

The need to understand how to configure and support complex storage networks is ideally geared to an indirect sale. Looking ahead, the opportunities for the channel to introduce Infiniband-based solutions will centre on such diverse areas as Oracle clusters, grid computing, shared file systems and disaster recovery. It looks set to challenge Ethernet’s decade-long dominance as a high-performance interconnect technology.

Infiniband can now be seen as a serious alternative for the first time in addressing common problems of Ethernet’s relative lack of scaleability, high latency and load on the CPU.

In offering a 20GB roadmap, Infiniband offers greater scaleability: at the same time, it delivers more effective use of bandwidth, together with far higher messaging rates than those currently achieved by Ethernet. By tackling such performance constraints, Infiniband is likely to appeal to end-users.

Whether or not Infiniband is truly a ‘sleeping giant’ remains to be seen. Yet there is no doubt that the experience gained over the past six years in establishing the technology in its core HPC market provides an excellent springboard for the channel in adding tangible value in what for many will be a new area of opportunity. C

Paul Hickingbotham is solutions manager at Hammer.