InfiniBand Gets Serious

The InfiniBand Trade Association (ITA) has announced plans to publish an InfiniBand integrators list in support of the group's compliance and interoperability program (see Infiniband: It's Official).

The list will provide information on products that have passed a suite of compliance and interoperability tests. The first list will be published in the second quarter of 2002 and will be updated after ITA quarterly plugfests to reflect the most up-to-date information as products and testing suites evolve.

The announcement came at the Fall 2001 InfiniBand Solutions Conference, which is being held in Los Angeles this week. The two-day conference includes a day of training for IT managers and a day of panels hosted by industry veterans and panelists from across the InfiniBand community.

Getting IT managers up to speed on InfiniBand is very important,” said Allyson Klein, InfiniBand marketing manager for Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC). She said data center managers from organizations such as Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of Washington

are out in numbers at the show.

Moira Gunn, host of National Public Radio’s broadcast, "TechNation: Americans & Technology," delivered the opening keynote, and around 30 member companies are exhibiting their InfiniBand products and demos.”If you have an interest in InfiniBand, you need to get over here,” said Amit Shah of Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL), chairman of the InfiniBand Trade Association's Steering Committee. “As InfiniBand solutions are delivered to the marketplace, the industry and our customers require an independent measurement of product compliance and interoperability support."

The testing is being developed by the compliance and interoperability working group of the ITA, which includes 16 different member companies and is co-chaired by Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM).

— Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch
http://www.byteandswitch.com