9/29/2005 -- Cisco Systems Inc. yesterday announced its new InfiniBand-based Server Fabric Switch (SFS) portfolio and new VFrame 3.0 data center virtualization software.

InfinBand is a next-gen I/O architecture designed for high-end servers. Cisco more or less got into the InfiniBand business when it acquired the former TopSpin Networks earlier this year. Analysts saw Cisco’s TopSpin gambit as a departure from its traditional emphasis on IP-based solutions.

"Topspin lets Cisco further hedge its still IP-dominated bets. Maybe InfiniBand will end up displacing Ethernet and Fibre Channel for certain types of tasks. Or maybe not. In either case, Cisco will have compelling product to offer," wrote Gordon Haff, a senior analyst with consultancy Illuminata, earlier this year. "Cisco is maturing and moving up the stack. Sure, it still sells the underlying network plumbing and makes numerous and regular bets on what types and sizes of switches customers will buy. But its focus is increasingly on its core franchise as the enterprise interconnect of choice."

To some extent, Cisco’s announcement validates Haff’s perspective. The company positioned its new InfiniBand-based products as part of its overall Data Center Networking Architecture portfolio, which describes a data center backbone and control system designed to help organizations connect and provision their data center compute, I/O and storage resources.

In this respect, Cisco’s new SFS product portfolio taps InfiniBand as a high performance unified fabric for connecting servers into grids of compute resources. It can be used as a complement to Cisco’s SFS advanced Ethernet and Fibre Channel gateway technologies, such that server grids can be connected to shared LAN and SAN resources.

Cisco’s new SFS portfolio includes the SFS 7000 Series InfiniBand Server Switches, the SFS 3000 Series Multifabric Server Switches, and Cisco’s InfiniBand Host Channel Adapters.

"InfiniBand is a compelling technology for our customers," said Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco’s Datacenter, Switching and Security Technology Group, in a statement. "By taking advantage of its inherent security and control capabilities, in addition to its well-publicized high-bandwidth and low-latency characteristics, we are able to deliver to our customers high-performance networking combined with the economics of a unified fabric and the flexibility of data center virtualization." -Stephen Swoyer