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How is Infiniband not commodity? It's not GbE cheap, but it's also a lot lower latency and 20x-40x the bandwidth. Infiniband is about $250-$500 per port, which
by rbranson 16y ago
How is Infiniband not commodity? It's not GbE cheap, but it's also a lot lower latency and 20x-40x the bandwidth. Infiniband is about $250-$500 per port, which is around what 10GbE costs right now.
- mmt 16y agoI had been dismisising Infiniband out of hand for a few years now, assuming it remained too uncompetitively[1] expensive, much as 10GE has. However, 2-4x the bandwidth (and lower latency) than 10GE, for the same price, could make it compelling. Does the price you quote include all of host adapters, cables, and switch ports? How is Infiniband not commodity? How many suppliers are there for the critical components? There may be more than one vendor for adapters, but if they all use the same HBA-on-a-chip, the market hasn't yet been commoditized. [1] Since my POV is centered around disk I/O, it would compete against SAS. Per 8-lane bundle, it's 24x the bandwidth at about $400 at the host and $100 at the expander, as of the previous generation. The current generation doubles the bandwidth, though I don't have reliable "street" prices yet.