What killed InfiniBand

When I first wrote about InfiniBand as an emerging technology back in 2002, the high speed (up to 30G bit/sec) serial interconnect specification looked like the clear successor to Ethernet as a universal data center network fabric. Then came server blades, which plug into a common backplane inside a rack-mounted box (chassis).

While InfiniBand provided a very fast, extremely low latency interconnect, blade server manufacturers passed on it in favor of their own proprietary protocols within the chassis.

Outside of the box, two other, industry standard I/O fabrics evolved to interconnect servers with servers, storage and other I/O devices in the data center: Ethernet, at 1 to 10G bit/sec; and high-speed Fibre Channel, at 1 to 20G bit/sec. While many data centers have continued to evolve with Ethernet and Fibre Channel, the industy has long since scaled back expectations for InfiniBand, from a universal data center interconnect fabric to a tool for server clustering. But very few data centers today have standardized on it for any use.

The other day I was speaking with Alex Yost, vice president and business line executive for IBM’s BladeCenter line, and I asked him why InfiniBand didn't evolve to become the network fabric of choice for blade servers - both inside and outside of the chassis. He explains it this way:

"The network guy and the server guy have always been connected by a long cable. Now [with blade servers] they're in the same compartment. And now we're going to give them a new fabric? Only the most innovative IT departments have been able to accept that."

I'll be chatting with Alex during a panel discussion about the future of blade servers, interoperability and innovation at the Computerworld Data Center Directions virtual trade show on August 26th at 3:00 p.m.

Also joining me will be Gary Thome, HP's director of BladeSystem strategy and architecture and Kurt Lender, an executive at Intel who is promoting the chipmaker's Server System Infrastructure (SSI), an open blade server specification it hopes the industry will adopt. The program description for Blade Servers: Fast growing, innovative - and incompatible, appears here.

I'll be leaving plenty of time for audience questions. Alternately, you can post questions you'd like me to ask below or e-mail your questions to me at robert_mitchell@computerworld.com. I hope you can drop in.