Faster Ramp, Adoption of InfiniBand

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