c0t0d0s0.org

Interesting editorial at HPCwire about the competition between Infiniband and 10 GbE. I´m not sure about the final results of this compeition. 10 GBe will win the WAN and Campus Network part for sure, but i see a vast market for Infiniband in the datacenter, especially for in-data-center fabrics. 10GBASE-T is signal processing at the border of the economical unreasonable effort. You need digital signal processors to do the job. I don´t believe we will see prices of 10GB-T NICs in the range of Infiniband anytime soon, and NIC costs are quite a factor in large fabrics. BTW: Out of this reason, 10GBASE-CX4 looks like a reasonable solution to me, as it uses similar cabling like Infiniband and they made the same design decision as IB, they´ve sacrified range for speed to keep the transceivers simpler. At the end: The race of datacenter fabrics isn´t decided at all ...