3Com to Develop InfiniBand Products

Ahh, the bus wars continue, but since nobody's calling it a war anymore and both HyperTransport and 3GIO both seem to continue to gather support, why shouldn't we figure that InfiniBand wouldn't still be on the playing field as well? Keeping the InfiniBand bus strategy in play, the Boys from Armonk announced that they would work with 3Com to integrate IBM's InfiniBand technology (called InfiniBlue) into future 3Com networking products. 3Com says it will build InfiniBand connectivity products that will allow the next generation of InfiniBand-enabled servers and existing PCI/PCI-X-based servers to seamlessly connect to an InfiniBand network. In case you hadn't heard, InfiniBand is high-speed common I/O standard that uses a channel-based switch fabric architecture and sports a claimed scaleable performance from 500 MegaBytes per second to 6 Gigabytes per second per link. The companies think InfiniBand will replace PCI and PCI-X bus-based technology. Other companies think that HyperTransport will do the job. Intel and its pals are betting on 3GIO (Arapahoe) as PCI's successor. And, to make things even more confusing, some folks say that the different bus strategies may just work and play well together. Believe what you will, in the end, the decisions will come from the big tech companies and we'll all just have to adapt.