InfiniBand Products In The Works

Interface card maker JNI Corp. and switching company Paceline Systems Corp. both announced upcoming products based on IBM InfiniBand technology.

Interface card maker JNI Corp. and switching company Paceline Systems Corp. both announced upcoming products based on IBM InfiniBand technology Monday. InfiniBand is an emerging I/O technology for data center servers, and it could become a $3 billion market by 2005, according to a recent Salomon Smith Barney Inc. report. IBMs product line, called InfiniBlue, comes from the Armonk, N.Y., firms microelectronics division. JNI, of San Diego, announced its intent to build 4x-speed 10 GB/sec InfiniBand host channel adapters using IBMs chips. The modules will also support 1x-speed 2.5 GB/sec connections; both will run on numerous operating systems, like Linux and Microsoft Corp.s Windows.
The products will be available by the end of this year, according to JNI. Theyll be especially useful in server clusters, officials said. JNI and IBM are also evaluating joint efforts for future InfiniBand developments. Details of those were not immediately available. Meanwhile, Paceline, of Acton, Mass., makes switching systems, and theyll use a different version of the IBM chips to build InfiniBand switches for host card adapters like JNIs to attach to. Pacelines product will be ready for July, said Carl Blume, director of product marketing. Future Paceline versions may have quality-of-service features and higher port density, he said.