Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers
in the World and the People Who Run Them
Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications
Blog: HPC Community Voices
HPC Community Voices | Main Blog Index
December 01, 2010
Mellanox and QLogic Play Duopoly
On Monday, Mellanox said it will buy Voltaire for $8.75 per share, or about $218 million. Excluding Voltaire's cash, Mellanox is getting the company for about $176 million. The $200 million per year InfiniBand networking market is now a duopoly between Mellanox and QLogic, the two suppliers which design their own adapter and switch chips.
The deal ensures the survival of Voltaire-branded products. According to Adam Zagorski, VP of Forecasting at IT Brand Pulse, Voltaire earned a leading 38% share of the InfiniBand switch market in Q3 of 2010. However, I believe Voltaire was destined to be acquired because they were unprofitable, with no relief to the bleeding in sight. They were unprofitable because their product costs were too high. And their product costs were too high because they sourced InfiniBand switch chips from their unsympathetic competitor, Mellanox. Their options for achieving lower product costs were to design their own chips, or get acquired by chip providers QLogic or Mellanox.
This acquisition also marks a change in Mellanox’s strategy. Until now Mellanox was straddling the fence on the Voltaire relationship. They were supplying the dominant switch supplier with chips, but strangling them at the same time with high chip prices, all while they marketed their own switch line. Mr. Zagorski said Mellanox carved out 18% of switch market share in Q3 of 2010. But it appears they came to the realization they need Voltaire’s software, sales and marketing to ensure they dominate the InfiniBand switch segment, just as they dominate the InfiniBand LOM and HCA segment. After the acquisition, the new Mellanox will start business with a dominant 56% switch market share.
QLogic garnered 14% of the InfiniBand host channel adapter market, and 27% of the InfiniBand switch market, in Q3 of 2010. Given that industry pioneer Mellanox now owns the leading technology, software, sales and marketing machines for InfiniBand host channel adapters and switches, the company is well positioned to fend off challenges from QLogic, a company focused on their Fibre Channel host bus adapter duopoly game versus Emulex.
QLogic’s position was underscored in a Cannacord|Genuity Flash Update where Paul Mansky said, “QLogic currently has ~20% of the IB market and has pointed to OEM share gain as a future catalyst. Mellanox counts HP, Dell and IBM as major customers, and Oracle recently acquired 10% of the company in the open market. Voltaire’s key customers are HP and IBM (33% of sales). With this transaction, Mellanox takes a big step toward the 80/20 rule upper hand, thereby materially challenging QLogic’s future IB market share potential.”
Posted by Michael Feldman - December 01, 2010 @ 12:12 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Discussion
There are 0 discussion items posted.
|
Join the Discussion |
Sponsored Links
Join Michael Wolfe as he compares the advantages and costs of using both low-level models and the directive-based OpenACC model for programming accelerated heterogeneous systems. Registration is free.
Accelerate your science with Seneca
One of the first HPC providers installing a 4X NVIDIA Kepler K-20 cluster. Invites you to a free evaluation on Seneca’s NVIDIA K20 Kepler cluster, pre-loaded with AMBER, NAMD, LAMMPS
High-Performance Computing in Action
Businesses that want to be on the cutting edge of their industries are increasingly turning to high-performance computing (HPC) solutions to handle complex compute processes and speed up their rate of innovation. Download this Executive Brief to see how businesses in energy, life sciences and entertainment put HPC solutions to work in their operations.
- Acer and Altair simplify cluster computing
- ClusterStor™ 1500 – High Performance Efficiency
- The Accelerated Genomics Cloud $25,000 Giveaway
- Visualize Historical Usage for Optimized Returns on HPC Investments
- Memory Debugging Challenges in Parallel and Distributed Applications
- PGI 2013: OpenMP 1.5X faster than GCC, new GNU-compatible OpenACC C++ compiler, CUDA 5 and Tesla K20 support, and more.
- Introducing the Cray CS300 Cluster Supercomputer Series
- Receive Higher Application Performance with end-to-end 56GbE
RSS Feeds
Feeds by Topic
- Applications
- Developer Tools
- Interconnects
- Middleware
- Networks
- Processors
- Storage
- Systems
- Visualization
Feeds by Industry
Feeds by Content Type
- Features
- Blogs
- Short Takes
- Off the Wire
- Whitepapers
- Multimedia
- HPC Soundbite Podcasts
- HPCwire Job Bank
Subscribe to All Content
Michael Feldman
Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.
Recent Comments
No Recent Blog Comments
Feature Articles
NSF Forges Further Beyond FLOPs
In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...
CERN, Google Drive Future of Global Science Initiatives
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
Saddling Phi for TACC’s Stampede
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...
Short Takes
Running Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Cloud
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
Computing the Physics of Bubbles
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
Internet2 Awards Program Seeks Innovative Applications
May 10, 2013 |
Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
Read more...
Floating Funding to Exascale Island
May 09, 2013 |
The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
Read more...
Sponsored Whitepapers
Best Practices in Big Data Storage
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
Progress in Parallel: the Bull Parallel Programming Center
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
Sponsored Multimedia
SGI DMF ZeroWatt Disk Solution
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
Cray CS300-AC Cluster Supercomputer Air Cooling Technology Video
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.
Blogs by Topics
Blogs by Author
- James Reinders
- Gary Johnson
- Andrew Jones
- Tiffany Trader
- Addison Snell
- Nicole Hemsoth
- Charlie Catlett
- Sue Korn
- Michael Feldman
- Chris Willard
- Isaac Lopez
- Tom Tabor
- Cathy Davidson
- William Lu
- Michael Wolfe
- Dan Gatti
- Caroline Connor
HPC Blogroll
- Computing Research Policy Blog
- Interconnects
- Reed's Ruminations
- Scalability.org
- StorageMojo
- Sun HPC Watercooler
Featured Events
- June 13, 2013
- June 14, 2013
Think Beyond Plastics Conference
Berkeley, CA
United States
- June 16, 2013
- June 20, 2013
ISC'13
Leipzig,
Germany
.gif)
- June 17, 2013
- June 18, 2013
Forecast 2013
San Francisco, CA
United States
- June 20, 2013
- June 21, 2013
CIO North America
Marina Del Rey, CA
United States
- June 24, 2013
- June 25, 2013
The Trading Show Chicago
Chicago, IL
United States
- June 25, 2013
- June 26, 2013
TERATEC 2013 Forum
Paris,
France
