Mellanox is doing its part to advance this effort by releasing chips that can send data at 10 gigabits per second. Today, it released a new "reference" computer called Nitro II, a design computer that designers may copy to build InfiniBand servers. The Nitro II design stacks as many as 14 server "blades" side by side in the same cabinet. Each blade has a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 processor and memory but, unlike current blade servers, no hard drive. The blades are joined to each other and to storage systems with two 16-port 10-gigabit-per-second InfiniBand switches. But InfiniBand hasn't seen the booming success for which advocates had hoped. Initially expected in 2001 as a successor to the widely used PCI data pathway, it's only now beginning to trickle into some computer equipment, and many in the industry no longer consider it a PCI replacement. Intel withdrew from the market, but Mellanox hopes to make sure the void is filled. Among the skeptics is Mary McDowell, formerly head of Compaq's ProLiant server business and now leading that group at HP. She believes the prevailing TCP/IP networking used in Ethernet and the Internet will continue its dominance, even in the controlled "data centre" environments where customers run dozens of networked computers. It's a natural path to extend TCP/IP networks, and customers "are not going to invest in a whole new infrastructure around InfiniBand", she said. IBM, however, the largest server maker, differs. It's planning InfiniBand connections as a core element of its plan to converge several high-end server designs. Sun Microsystems and Dell also are fans.
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