TheInfoPro

20 November 2009 – The industry all heard yesterday that InfiniBand has “rocketed” up the adoption curve in a very small portion of the networking application space, supercomputer clustering.  We thought we would go back and check our data to see where the rest of the enterprise community put InfiniBand on the priority list.  We had to go back a ways to find it -about 12 months or so.  In interviews conducted in 2008 we found that only 6% of enterprises had InfiniBand in use, according to the networking professionals interviewed.  With little or no growth prospects to speak of in these same interviews we removed InfiniBand from the roadmap examination for networking in 2009.  In the same industry trade press coverage of the conference on supercomputing, SC09, we noted that Gigabit Ethernet was acknowledged as still being used in a majority of the top 500 instances of supercomputing clusters.  In fact, commercial enterprises have acknowledged that the price/performance of Gigabit Ethernet makes it a clear choice for data center networking.  So why keep beating the drum about InfiniBand as a networking technology?  While there are some specific applications where it may out perform Ethernet, the vast majority of instances favor Gigabit Ethernet going forward in the data center as the best value networking protocol both now and in the data center of the future.

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