ACADEMIA

According to Taneja Group, InfiniBand is proven, reliable and the best choice for next generation interconnects

The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) has released an analyst report from Taneja Group, demonstrating the continued market growth of InfiniBand products in the supercomputing and emerging as an attractive choice for the core of the enterprise data center.

The July 2012 report examines technology and solution trends where higher-speed switched fabrics are required for optimal performance, including solutions like big data, web-scale applications, scale-out storage and virtual I/O for mission-critical applications. According to the report, “Data center architects need a high-speed switched fabric at the core of the new data center. Today that choice is clearly InfiniBand.”

“We’ve witnessed InfiniBand’s growth in the HPC over the last decade due to its ability to deliver application performance and data center efficiencies, and we anticipate InfiniBand to become increasingly relevant in the enterprise data center for the same reasons,” said Bill Lee, InfiniBand Trade Association. “Big Data analysis, virtualized data centers, and scale-out web services are only a few of the applications that have seen significant performance improvement when run on InfiniBand.”

According to Mike Matchett, senior analyst of Taneja Group, InfiniBand is well suited to tackle the growing demands of the enterprise data center – manage growing data, host denser computing clusters and meet increasing performance demands – all areas the HPC community has pioneered for years. The July report points out that conditions are right for InfiniBand growth: “As hardware refresh cycles pick up again with the burgeoning economy, and more physically dense, converged resources become the norm, we expect InfiniBand adoption to continue at a high rate in HPC but really accelerate its march on the data center core.”

The report also observes the overall health of the InfiniBand industry, citing Intel’s recent acquisition of QLogic’s InfiniBand portfolio and InfiniBand’s longevity as proof points for data center architects to consider InfiniBand in their next generation data center. According to the report, “This isn’t a new technology that already stressed IT staff have to puzzle out from scratch and pray that it ‘sticks.’ Rather, since it’s proven, reliable, constantly evolving and tested at a massive scale, InfiniBand is here to stay.”

The complete report from Taneja Group is available for download on the IBTA website.