Will InfiniBand benefit the telecom industry and how?
Initially InfiniBand will be deployed as a server infrastructure fabric. This will benefit the entire communications industry by speeding the rate of communication into server farms. Over time, InfiniBand form factors and manageability will benefit traditional telecom environments by enabling a shift from proprietary switch fabric solutions to industry standard fabric solutions. • What happens to Fibre Channel with the advent of InfiniBand ? Think of Fibre Channel as a super subset set of InfiniBand Fibre Channel is a storage area networking technology. For connections to the drive, Fibre Channel will make sense for the next several years. Drive vendors will likely adopt InfiniBand interfaces once the technology is cost effective. However, this is several years away. • Is PCI being replaced by InfiniBand in 2005? We see InfiniBand dominating the data center by that time. Yes. PCI will be a legacy only connection, similar to ISA 3 years ago in servers. • If you have a PCI bus on the ser
