Intel Moving to Infiniband

Intel had recently acquired the company call Neteffect which is focusing on 10Gbps adapter’s technology. As 10Ge is no longer a new thing in the market, but we still do not see it become the popular solution in the industry due to the expensive switches, NIC and solution that been widely control by the technology leader in networking solution. As we may also see some technology related to Ethernet infiniband which provide 20Gbps by using HCA (host channel adapter), that will be another major competitor to be compared with the 10Ge.

Personally I had been urging the storage and network vendor over and over again regarding the 10Ge products. The reason of it is pretty simple that the Fiber Channel is just too expensive to be deployed and managed VS Ethernet 10Ge. But the concern is the vendors are very slow responding to the 10Ge release roadmap although customers are demanding on that.

With Intel moving to the market now, I will see that is a big opportunity to make this 10Ge become inexpensive in the future with the high volume production provide by Intel in the servers’ market NIC. As virtualization becomes an important piece in the data center, the bandwidth will require being growing as much as possible at the same time VS CPU Cores and Memory. Intel had proven their right track on the servers NIC as many of us can easily found that the servers NICs are produced by Intel. Even in VMware ESX servers, your VM will be provided either AMD or Intel virtual NIC drivers on top of the hypervisor Virtualization.

As a IT Consumers, I am more than happy to see the technology become cheaper and cheaper and of course personally I do believe Intel will able to make the popularization for 10Ge moving forward.