Infiniband vendors were out in full force at the Intel Developer Forum Conference earlier this month, looking to attract the attention of software developers.
InfiniBand, the next-generation I/O architecture whose initial 1.0 release was made available last October, probably wont hit the market until the fourth quarter of this year, but protocol analyzers from Agilent Technologies are now available for developers ready to catch the InfiniBand wave.
As InfiniBand moves server hardware away from the PCI I/O bus and onto shared I/O systems, management software from companies such as Lane 15 Software will be crucial for the success of InfiniBand.
On the hardware side, RedSwitch and Agilent unveiled an eight-port InfiniBand switch supporting a maximum aggregate bandwidth of 160G bps (bidirectional).