It appears that all is not quiet on the InfiniBand front as two start-ups, InfiniSwitch Corp. and Lane 15 Software Inc. announced Monday they will merge to develop offerings based on the next-generation bus technology.
The new company, to be called InfiniSwitch, will be led by Lane 15’s CEO Alissa Nessler, and will incorporate InfiniSwitch’s data centre InfiniBand switching solutions, and Lane 15’s fabric computing management software.
InfiniBand – meaning infinite bandwidth – is a short-distance input/output interconnect technology that connects servers and networks, and is ideally suited for data centres. The technology operates at speeds of 2.5Gbps up to 10Gbps, and is designed to overcome the limitations of shared-memory and bus I/O architectures.
Westborough, Mass.-based InfiniSwitch has focused its efforts on products, which bridge and route InfiniBand to gigabit Ethernet networks. The company has developed a 12-port InfiniBand switch and a four-port host channel adapter designed for large-scale vendors including IBM Corp., and Lucent Corp.
Lane 15 in Austin, Tex. is presently the only remaining InfiniBand management software maker in the industry, and its fabric management system has become the de facto standard used to deliver centralized control and computing power on-demand to the enterprise data centre, according to industry experts. Both InfiniSwitch and Lane 15 are on the Steering Committee for the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA).
While the merger signifies better things for the technology, InfiniBand has yet to make it into mainstream use. Last year, InfiniBand was expected to become the transport of choice for server networks that supported inter-processor communications and server clustering, however, the market is currently only made up of a handful of vendors investing in the technology. Industry leaders like IBM, Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. discontinued InfiniBand development last year, while some start-ups refocused efforts on gigabit Ethernet.
Still, InfiniBand has claimed support from a few verticals including high-performance computing, supercomputing and the oil and gas exploration markets.
The new combined InfiniSwitch Corp. will continue operations in both Massachusetts and Texas locations. For details visit www.infiniswitch.com.
