6/12/2007 -- It's beginning to look like Cisco Systems Inc.'s bet on InfiniBand, like its multibillion bet on IP TV (via its acquisition of Scientific Atlanta), was a savvy move.

InfiniBand is a next-gen I/O architecture designed for high-end servers. Cisco got into the InfiniBand business when it acquired the former Topspin Networks in early 2005. At the time, analysts saw Cisco's Topspin gambit as a departure from its traditional emphasis on IP-based solutions.

"Maybe InfiniBand will end up displacing Ethernet and Fibre Channel for certain types of tasks. Or maybe not. In either case, Cisco will have a compelling product to offer," wrote Gordon Haff, a senior analyst with consultancy Illuminata, at the time. "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."

At this point, InfiniBand doesn't pose any real threat to IP's dominance. That could change, however, according to market watcher International Data Corp. (IDC), which says that the infrastructure challenges posed by ever-expanding server and storage workloads are encouraging IT executives to take a second look at the technology. This trend, along with parallel demands in high-performance computing (HPC), scale-out database environments and shared virtualized I/O will cause InfiniBand host channel adaptor (HCA) revenues to nearly quadruple, surging from $62.3 million in 2006 to $224.7 million by 2011.

That's just the tip of the juggernaut, so to speak. Over the same period, IDC predicted, demand for InfiniBand switches will all but explode, growing from $94.9 million last year to $612.2 million in 2011.

There's at least some basis for IDC's projections. For one thing, researchers point out, InfiniBand is steadily gaining share in Top 500 Supercomputer implementations, which are usually (but not exclusively) associated with scientific or technical computing. In this respect, IDC said, not only is InfiniBand becoming a preferred interconnect for HPC, but its adoption is coming at the expense of more widely used solutions.

In addition, IDC added, Infiniband is morphing into a viable datacenter interconnect contender.

"CIOs are looking beyond point solutions and treating the datacenter more holistically," said Steve Josselyn, research director for IDC's Global Enterprise Server Solution. "There is evidence that InfiniBand is beginning to find its way into commercial data centers for use in support of applications and workloads with HPC-like characteristics. As the need for more of these types of applications increases in the commercial world, InfiniBand provides a viable and cost-effective alternative to existing network infrastructures."

Cisco's SFS-7000 Series switches use InfiniBand to provide a high-performance unified fabric for connecting servers together into grids of compute resources. The networking giant recently notched a deal with data warehousing appliance specialist DATAllegro to promote its InfiniBand offerings in tandem with that company's high-volume -- typically 5TB and over -- data warehouse appliances.

DATAllegro officials, for their part, say that InfiniBand is a superior alternative to 10 Gigabit Ethernet and other challengers.

"We like the performance and [low] latency [of InifniBand] for our data warehousing architecture," said DATAllegro CEO Stuart Frost, at the time. "[W]e see Cisco's InfiniBand switches as a crucial component of [DATAllegro's DW appliances]." --Stephen Swoyer