Since acquiring Silverstorm and PathScale, QLogic Corp. has been steadily upping the ante in its bet on InfiniBand. When it introduced its TrueScale ASIC last year, it became the second source of InfiniBand silicon alongside Mellanox. Unlike Mellanox however, QLogic wouldn’t be offering its ASIC on the open market, preferring to use its home-grown silicon for its own switches and HCAs. Last November at the 2008 Supercomputing Conference in Austin, Texas, the company unveiled a switch ASIC for a new line of quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand products.

It looks like these investments are starting to pay off. On Wednesday, the company announced a deal that will bring its QDR 12000 series InfiniBand switches into IBM’s Dynamic Infrastructure portfolio. Dynamic Infrastructure is IBM’s buzzword-laden initiative that provides integrated computing, networking, storage and services for the next generation datacenter. The importance to QLogic is that its 12000 series offerings are going to be the first QDR director switches sold with IBM’s HPC systems.

With up to 864 ports and an aggregate bandwidth of 51.8 terabits per second, the 12000 series are the highest capacity QDR InfiniBand switches on the market today (discounting the 3,456-port Magnum switch Sun Microsystems designed specifically for its Constellation supercomputers). Mellanox offers its own high capacity QDR switch, the MTS3610, which tops out at 324 ports. Voltaire’s Grid Director 4700 also offers 324 ports, and includes an option to double the capacity to 648 ports using double-density fabric boards. All of these systems are just hitting the streets now.

According to Jesse Parker, QLogic’s vice president and general manager of the Network Solutions Group, QLogic intentionally pushed the envelope in capacity to address larger clusters. “If you look at HPC, the demand continues to increase for much higher node count systems and much higher port count switches,” he explains. In Parker’s estimation, going from the previous high-water mark of 288 ports to 324 ports was not nearly enough to keep up with these ever-expanding HPC systems. He also noted that the leaf and spine switch modules are interchangeable from chassis to chassis, so it’s easy to scale the 12000 switches both up and down.

QLogic points to its power consumption of 7.8 watts per InfiniBand port as the best in the business. However, it should be noted that Voltaire claims 6.5 watts per port for the Grid Director 4700, and Mellanox specs out all its switches at a modest 3.5 watts per port. I get the impression that the companies are measuring power consumptions under different conditions or perhaps with different connectors. Obviously, an apples-to-apples comparison by an independent third party would be a lot more useful than the marketing brochures.

Beyond the hardware specs, QLogic believes one of its big differentiators is its InfiniBand Fabric Suite. The software suite provides a central tool that encompasses management, diagnostics and installation across the entire InfiniBand infrastructure. The idea is to make InfiniBand as easy to deploy and operate as any other datacenter network. Parker says the company’s experience in enterprise storage was the key, since it was able to migrate some of the capabilities from its Fibre Channel management tools into its InfiniBand software. Making InfiniBand more enterprise-friendly would address one of the significant criticisms of the technology.

More broadly, QLogic sees itself as an enterprise company and brings that persona into its HPC business. Parker thinks the company’s heritage in the enterprise space is going to serve it well, especially as the InfiniBand market continues to grow and mature. Beyond that, he believes the company’s sheer size and breadth of products offer a more attractive partner for OEMs than its smaller competitors in this space. Although IBM was the first one to sign up for QLogic’s new director switch, Parker says they expect a number of announcements from other tier one OEMs in the coming months.

With QDR in particular, Parker sees InfiniBand entering a new phase, with customers now more focused on overall capability and product sophistication rather than just pure performance. He characterizes QLogic’s competition as “shooting behind the duck” — a metaphor meant to signify that customer demand is moving beyond the design points of some these current products. With all three InfiniBand vendors now well into QDR deployment — and with Eight Data Rate (EDR) products already under development — the InfiniBand space is bound to get a lot more interesting.