InfiniBand Is Not Taking Over

InfiniBand's proponents are waving the flag again, declaring that their interconnect technology is on the rise.

We've been here before -- several times. (See Suppliers Push Unified Fabrics Based on InfiniBand, Users Bang InfiniBand Drum, and InfiniBand to Transcend HPC.) Every six months or so, InfiniBand promoters, including the InfiniBand Trade Assocation, launch fresh claims about how InfiniBand will take over the data center, even as the world waits for 10-Gbit/s Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), 8-Gbit/s Fibre Channel, and other links-in-progress.

But InfiniBand isn't taking over every data center. Despite its robust growth, it's likely to remain a niche play -- albeit a lucrative niche play, particularly when it comes to storage.

"Overall, storage represents about a $40 billion market, which experiences single-digit growth," says Raj Das, VP of storage at SGI. "We think 10 percent of that market is high-performance storage. That's a $4 billion market growing at 10 to 15 percent, and we are growing faster than that... We're happy to be part of that; we think there's plenty of room for us and others in that segment."

Other InfiniBand market estimates are more modest. According to IDC's latest stats on InfiniBand, factory revenues from InfiniBand adapters will reach $279.7 million by 2011, with a 35 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Switch port factory revenues will reach $656.4 million in the same timeframe, with a 47.2 percent CAGR.These figures are higher than IDC's predictions for InfiniBand last June, but they are still in the ballpark. As IDC analyst Stephen Josselyn told Byte and Switch earlier this week: "It's still a relatively small market comparatively speaking."

Even if one considers InfiniBand growth in ports shipped, which promoters prefer to do because the growth rate is higher, the predictions from IDC call for 991,878 ports to ship overall by 2011 -- a fraction of the millions of Ethernet ports shipped every year. And for further comparison, QLogic alone claims to have shipped over than 1.4 million Fibre Channel ports in 2007.

The world's semiannual Top 500 Supercomputers list shows that InfiniBand is a niche play even within high performance computing (HPC): Figures from November 2007 show InfiniBand was the interconnect of choice for 24.2 percent of the world's Top 500 systems -- down from 25.60 percent in June 2007. Gigabit Ethernet, in contrast, was used in 54 percent of systems, up from 41.20 percent in June 2007.

This isn't to detract from InfiniBand's momentum, which appears to be accelerating. And there is ample evidence that enterprises using complicated financial applications, or ones in verticals such as media and entertainment, require higher throughput than they're getting from other kinds of interconnections.

But those interconnections are growing, too: Proponents of 10-Gbit/s Ethernet, 8-Gbit/s Fibre Channel, and FCoE are all pounding their pulpits beside the InfiniBandwagon. Granted, some of these technologies are still on the drawing board, which will give InfiniBand a lead time for further penetration. Still, that doesn't mean InfiniBand will outgrow its present environs by any wide margin.Bottom line? InfiniBand is growing, but, within the overall context of data center interconnections, it will continue to live in a niche. Even Cisco said as much when it announced its Nexus switch back in January: "We will not be incorporating InfiniBand into the Nexus platform," said Cisco spokeswoman Lee Davis. "InfiniBand is mainly needed for high performance computing (HPC) environments."

All that said, we're likely to hear more about InfiniBand's progress in the coming weeks. One announcement, that Mellanox is shipping 40-Gbit/s InfiniBand HCAs, went out this morning. And there are likely to be others at next week's SNW tradeshow in Orlando, Fla.

Sure, things could change. But given the situation so far, it's a safe bet InfiniBand will maintain, not exceed, its proportional contribution to data center interconnectivity.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.