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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J Fieb who wrote (2263)	9/18/2000 12:29:26 PM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

VENDORS SAY INFINIBAND IS NO PIPE DREAM Terry Sweeney Crank it up to Petabit Ethernet-that's 1,000 trillion, or a quadrillion bits per second. But high-speed networking standards won't fully deliver on the promised cascades of bandwidth if the bus in the workstation, or worse, the server, isn't upgraded in parallel. A vendor-led initiative, the InfiniBand Trade Association, envisions a redesigned motherboard to run at 2.5 Gbps. Companies like Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are working on a spec that would transform memory, processors and I/O subsystems, which now max out at about 500 megabytes per second. Many vendors and OEMs are already investing in InfiniBand, Ethernet and other high-speed technologies. "I think 2001 will be a year of intense vendor interest and activity," says Jonathan Eunice, research director at Illuminata Inc. "But since there's not a 1.0 version of the standard yet, I think we're looking at 2002 for products from a user perspective." InfiniBand, born of the merger between Intel's Next Generation I/O plan and Future I/O devised by Compaq, HP and IBM, describes the technology as a network approach to I/O. Channel adapters pass messages to the end points and handle transmission protocols, while the InfiniBand switching function inside the bus ensures information gets to its appropriate destination. Workstations and servers used to be speedier than the underlying network infrastructure, but the infrastructure has surpassed the end devices as it enters the gigabit threshold. "InfiniBand has the potential of turning that around," says Marshall Eisenberg, director of product marketing at Foundry Networks Inc. "Some say that desktops can't take advantage of all the bandwidth because the motherboard is constrained." And in the era of downloadable music, it's not too much of a stretch to anticipate DVDs that can be downloaded and stored, or streaming video and other myriad networking functions in the home or office-100 Mbps Ethernet, multiple voice channels and fax server access for starters. It's like trying to drink from the proverbial firehose. Still, InfiniBand is not primarily about the TV set top, desktop or personal computer. "InfiniBand is less client focused," says Eunice. "It's an issue of how computers, racks and servers are constructed underneath the covers." Some InfiniBand critics believe that the emerging PCI-X specification will be sufficient to connect server clusters, storage systems and the Internet. Others say Gigabit Ethernet or storage standard Fibre Channel are optimal interfaces to improve throughput. But in an industry where marketers are rarely hesitant to paint black and white scenarios, networks inhabit a gray area. Vendors and their customers won't be backed into a corner, regardless of which bus technology they buy or build. "If InfiniBand is successful it doesn't mean that other forms of networking like Gigabit Ethernet will be pushed aside," Eunice says. "Ethernet is familiar and it's got great commodity status that InfiniBand and Fibre Channel can't touch." Stay tuned to see which sector attains petabit status first. internetwk.com Copyright ® 2000 CMP Media Inc.