The IBTA also announces annual technical forum will be held Sept. 15 at Harrah's in Las Vegas

International Supercomputing Conference, DRESDEN, Germany, June 16 -- The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), a global organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand specification, today announced its latest link speed roadmap showing expected bandwidth for the InfiniBand interconnect for years 2008-2011 and beyond. The roadmap was researched and developed as a collaborative effort from the various IBTA workgroups; members of the IBTA include leading enterprise IT vendors who are actively contributing to the advancement of InfiniBand. The roadmap is available on the IBTA Web site at www.infinibandta.org/itinfo/IB_roadmap.

The roadmap shows projected increased market demand for InfiniBand 1x QDR, 4x DDR, 8x DDR and 12x DDR beyond 2011, which translates to bandwidths nearing 1000 Gb/s in the next three years.

"InfiniBand is expanding beyond high-performance computing and gaining increasing adoption in general purpose enterprise computing," said Jeff Boles, technology analyst at Taneja Group. "In terms of cost effectiveness, simplicity, flexibility and performance, InfiniBand is leaps and bounds beyond the competition. With the roadmap announced today, the IBTA is showing its commitment to supporting the specification as it evolves over the next several years to meet market demand."

For vendors with a stake in the interconnect business, the roadmap provides a vendor-neutral outline for the progression of InfiniBand so that they may plan their product development accordingly. For enterprise and high-performance computing end users, the roadmap provides specific milestones around expected improvements to ensure their InfiniBand investment is protected.

Success in the high-performance computing market has driven InfiniBand adoption into corporate datacenters, where enterprise customers -- primarily in banking, managed hosting services, Web 2.0, insurance services and healthcare -- are using InfiniBand interconnects in a variety of enterprise and database applications. InfiniBand is also being deployed in virtualized environments to cost-effectively scale virtual machines by delivering higher LAN and SAN throughputs for virtual machines.

"The publication of this roadmap represents a commitment by industry leaders to deliver the fastest link speeds, highest-usable bandwidth and lowest-latency input/output technology available," said Jim Pappas, IBTA steering committee co-chair. "Through the work of the IBTA and demand from end users, InfiniBand continues to strengthen its leadership as the high-speed server and storage interconnect of choice."

The IBTA Announces Dates for Annual Technical Forum

The IBTA also announced today that the annual InfiniBand technical forum has been planned for Sept. 15 at Harrah's in Las Vegas, Nev. The "IBTA Technical Forum '08: InfiniBand and the Enterprise Data Center" will include discussion on the IBTA's roadmap, as well as host presentations from end users who have deployed InfiniBand into their virtualization and database environments. John Enck, research vice president at Gartner, Inc., will provide the keynote. For end users, OEMs, hardware and software developers, system architects and product managers who would like to register for the technical forum, visit: www.regonline.com/IBTATechForum08. Registration is available for the early bird rate of $249; after Sept. 1 the rate increases to $299.

About the InfiniBand Trade Association

The InfiniBand Trade Association was founded in 1999 and is chartered with maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand specification. The IBTA is led by a distinguished steering committee that includes Cisco, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, QLogic, Sun and Voltaire. Other members of the IBTA represent leading enterprise IT vendors who are actively contributing to the advancement of the InfiniBand specification. The IBTA actively markets and promotes InfiniBand from an industry perspective through public relations engagements and unites the industry through IBTA-sponsored developer conferences and workshops. For more information on the IBTA, visit www.infinibandta.org.

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Source: the InfiniBand Trade Association