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William Lee Business Systems and Technology Organization Hewlett-Packard Company Recently, there has been a great deal of interest surrounding InfiniBand I/O. It is the merger of two specifications - Future I/O and NGIO (Next Generation I/O). The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) is led by industry leaders in computing - Compaq, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun. IBTA also includes a number of prominent IHVs as well. The interest InfiniBand has received has been truly phenomenal. With enterprise computing's largest and most influential companies involved, it's hard not to expect it. IBTA has established its own website - www.infinibandta.org and has a great deal of material posted, but the material does not reflect HP's perspective. The technology update HP would like to present will step through today's I/O interconnect - PCI. We will show why it is relevant today, and why it will be relevant tomorrow. We will then step through perceived problems with PCI implemented in shared-bus designs. |
HP will present its own solution - the ingenious N-class I/O subsystem and demonstrate how this architecture will prolong the useful life of PCI and PCI-X for many more years, and how HP will be there to provide our customers the right solution at the right time.
HP's PCI/PCI-X designs will meet the needs of our customers for the short to medium term, and we can deliver on customer expectations. Alas, new requirements are quickly emerging that will require a new I/O interconnect standard. This is where InfiniBand comes in. It is being developed to meet these new requirements, such as improved RAS, peer-to-peer connections, improved management, reduced TCO, etc. We will talk about how this enablement will happen - what elements need to be in place to make InfiniBand successful. Lastly, we will dive into what all this means to the end customer. We will talk about the shift to the customer-centric datacenter. We will also clearly spell out HP's differentiation as our stiffest competition is planning solutions of their own too. HP intends to make the PCI to InfiniBand transition transparent to the customer, since HP will focus on delivering the total solution rather than on individual technolgies that comprise that solution. |