During a recent presentation at the ACM IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), scientists from Google proposed an energy proportional data center using a unique Butterfly Topology architecture built with 40Gb/s InfiniBand switches and adapters. By taking advantage of the inherent flexibility of the InfiniBand interconnect (from 2.5Gb/s to 40Gb/s per port) to optimize data center utilization and minimize power consumption, the proposed InfiniBand network demonstrated an 85 percent reduction in power.

"The proposal for a high-performance enterprise data center built on InfiniBand is a logical step for this technology. Mellanox InfiniBand technology reduces power consumption in the datacenter to maximize energy efficiency thus driving a higher overall return-on-investment for businesses across multiple markets," said Eyal Waldman, chairman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies, we see this proposal as evidence of expansion of InfiniBand technology for enterprise networking, the Cloud, Internet hosting and Web 2.0 applications."