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Vendor Unification Brings Innovation to Ethernet: Page 2 of 3

The impending presence of a unified networking market has torn down the walls separating Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and Ethernet markets. The new technology battleground of CEE / FCoE has thrown Fibre Channel and InfiniBand vendors, in some cases naked, into the Ethernet market. This has created a strong sense of urgency among these new Ethernet vendors to establish differentiation and competitive advantage for their new Ethernet products.  In almost every case, their strategy is to bring innovation and specialized expertise to Ethernet based on their existing storage or server networking portfolio.

 

Great examples are recent announcements from Mellanox and Voltaire. Mellanox announced on Monday they are demonstrating Low Latency Ethernet (LLE) through an efficient RDMA transport over Layer2 10GbE networks for performance-critical and low-latency applications.  And just two weeks ago Voltaire announced their Scale Out Ethernet architecture featuring LLE for high performance business computing.

 

I expect these InfiniBand vendors to lead a trend towards LLE technology that is "just there" inside your CEE networking product. Ultimately, as LLE becomes much easier to sell, buy and deploy the technology will become a basic performance feature for enterprise data center architectures.