The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) announced that, according to updated research from IDC, high-performance computing (HPC), scale-out database environments, shared virtualized I/O, and increasing demands from financial applications are propelling worldwide InfiniBand shipments and adoption rates.

In its recent refresh of the Worldwide InfiniBand 2007-2011 Forecast, IDC increased the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for host channel adapter (HCA) revenue to 35 percent up from the 29.3 percent as predicted in 2007, with revenue reaching $279.7 million in 2011 up from $224.73 million from a 2007 prediction, and shipment CAGR to 51.5 percent, with 991,878 HCAs shipping in 2011 an increase from the 935,572 predicted in 2007. The CAGR for InfiniBand switch revenue is 47.2 percent, up by two percentage points from 2007 with revenue growing to $656.3 million in 2011 from $612.2 million as predicted in 2007, and shipment CAGR to 54.5 percent, with 1,561,543 switch ports shipping in 2011(1) previously set at 1,469,319 in 2007.

In the report, which has been updated since its original May 2007 release, IDC increased the adoption and shipment rate of 20Gb/s DDR InfiniBand ports, as the market demand for DDR outpaced their original forecasts. IDC also expects the adoption rate of 40Gb/s QDR InfiniBand to be similar to the rate of DDR adoption.

"The demand for increased bandwidth continues to grow, and the requirement to meet these needs without increasing the complexity or cost is still a major factor, and the establishment of InfiniBand as a standards-based architecture is a key for future customer adoption," said Stephen Josselyn, research director, Global Enterprise Server Solutions at IDC. "We have increased our forecast view incrementally based on the increased adoption of InfiniBand in enterprise datacenters and further penetration into the TOP500 supercomputing sites."

InfiniBand continues to strengthen its leadership as the high-speed interconnect of choice for high-performance clusters. According to the 30th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful computers, 125 supercomputers (25 percent of the list) are connected with InfiniBand, and the total number of InfiniBand connected CPU cores on the list has grown from 137K in 2006 to 340K in 2007 (148 percent yearly growth), which highlights the increasing demand for InfiniBand to maximize computing resources and performance.

Success in the HPC market is driving adoption into corporate datacenters. Dozens of enterprise customers -- primarily in banking, managed hosting services, Web 2.0, insurance services and healthcare -- are now using InfiniBand interconnects in a variety of applications such as Monte Carlo analysis, oil and gas exploration, vehicle modeling, semiconductor design, utility computing, and with clustered database solutions like Oracle 10g RAC and IBM DB2.

InfiniBand is also being deployed in virtualized environments to cost effectively scale virtual machines by delivering higher LAN and SAN throughputs for virtual machines. Higher I/O bandwidth and I/O consolidation in virtualized environments are critical needs, further exacerbated by deployment of multi-core CPUs and I/O real estate constraints driven by green datacenter initiatives. By consolidating I/O into a 'single wire,' InfiniBand solutions can help IT managers deploy more power-efficient blade servers (that lack I/O real estate) and save significantly by eliminating the use of multiple I/O adapters and related cabling complexity.

More than 35 different server manufacturers around the globe now offer InfiniBand interconnects to their end user customers. Additionally, all of the major systems vendors have incorporated InfiniBand options on their blade server platforms.

InfiniBand Trade Association