As momentum grows behind InfiniBand, Mellanox Technologies Inc. today will introduce a second generation of products supporting the emerging high-speed bus architecture.
The InfiniScale product family offers 160Gbits/s of available bandwidth, an integrated physical layer, and support for up to 192 ports, according to Mellanox. The first member of the family, the MT43132, is the second generation of the fabless semiconductor company's InfiniBand switch semiconductors.
"This is a real breakthrough in terms of InfiniBand for the data center," said Kevin Deierling, vice president of product marketing.
The InfiniScale switch improves the bandwidth of storage area networking and server clustering by a factor of 10, and is targeted at multiprotocol applications providing connections to both Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel ports, Deierling said.
"I'm actually holding one of the chips," he said. "We have silicon available today."
The InfiniBand standard, adopted last October, calls for 2.5 and 10Gbit/s speeds and supports both copper and fiber implementations. InfiniBand is one of several competing open-industry interconnect architectures. The seven founding members of the InfiniBand Trade Association-which now claims more than 200 members-are Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Micro-soft, and Sun Microsystems.
Mellanox was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., with design teams in Yokneam, Israel. Headed by chairman and chief executive Eyal Waldman, a former Intel Corp. executive, the privately held company has raised funds totaling $33 million, including an investment from Intel Capital, a venture capital arm of Intel, Santa Clara.
Mellanox's new device integrates 32 serializer/deserializers into a single 520-pin package, making it the first commercially available InfiniBand semiconductor to include both the logic and physical layer in a single device, according to the company. The integrated device simplifies board design, reduces total package size, and eliminates all external physical-layer parts, Deierling said.
The level of integration will be important to potential customers, said Will Strauss, an analyst at Forward Concepts Co., Tempe, Ariz. "The more things you can integrate on a single chip, the cheaper the solution."
The MT43132 is available in a 520-pin L2BGA package, and is priced at $458 in 10,000-piece quantities. A product development kit is available for $10,000 and includes an eight-port switch with standard 4x copper connectors in a 1U chassis with schematics, layout, bill of materials, and a software development kit.
