Qlogic Jumps on the Infiniband-wagon

Last week Qlogic announced the acquisition of an Infiniband silicon provider named Pathscale, Inc. for $109M. Although Qlogic is the latest storage-focused company to purchase Infiniband technology, it is not the first company in the storage market to get on the Infiniband-wagon. Cisco acquired an Infiniband company named Topspin for $250M last year. Engenio, SGI and Data Direct recently began shipping storage controller with Infiniband support for connecting to servers. Storage controllers from vendors like Netapp, HDS and Isilon are using Infiniband inside as a backbone or cluster interconnect. So why have vendors in the storage market started jumping onto the Infiniband-wagon?

The Infiniband market has grown substantially in the past few years. Users of clustered scientific applications deployed on commodity servers led the way. They found that Infiniband can be used to affordably "glue" servers together, creating a single computer. Infiniband-enabled clusters of up to 4,000 nodes are currently being deployed in this high performance computing market. The low latency and high bandwidth of Infiniband is perfect for these scientific computing customers.

Early adoption in the scientific computing space is transitioning to general purpose computing. Major systems vendors including Dell, HP, IBM, NEC and Sun are shipping pre-configured server clusters glued together with surprisingly affordable Infiniband technology. Legacy compute intensive data mining applications are being ported from big Unix boxes to affordable Linux clusters. Oracle 10 includes native Infiniband support. Infiniband industry alliances and open source initiatives are well underway. Customers deploying clustered applications on 1U servers and server blades with little room for network connectivity (network, storage, and server) are finding that Infiniband adapters in servers connected to multi-protocol switches can be used to cost effectively connect to clustered servers to Ethernet and Fiber Channel networks.

In my opinion Qlogic's purchase of PathScale is a bold and calculated bet that makes good business sense. Selling Infiniband adapters in servers is complimentary to Qlogic's core business model of selling Fibre Channel host bus adapters and it gets them into a new and quickly growing market. Cisco bought Topspin for similar reasons and the lofty goal of software running on Infiniband switches being a datacenter virtualization layer. A new switching and virtualization layer at the core of the data center and the opportunity to sell more adapters in servers -- seems a good bet to me. I wonder which storage vendor will be next to jump on the Infiniband-wagon ...