InfiniBand companies to merge

InfiniBand Monday came back into the spotlight when two start-ups, InfiniSwitch and Lane 15, announced that they will merge.

The resulting company, which will be called InfiniSwitch, will be led by Alissa Nessler, CEO of Lane 15. It will focus on products for linking servers into clusters in the data center to improve performance and efficiency.

Lane 15 Software is the only remaining management software provider for InfiniBand, having survived Vieo, who changed the focus of its products to systems management. InfiniSwitch, which has demonstrated a 12-port InfiniBand switch and a four-port host channel adapter, competes with start-ups Voltaire and InfiniCon.

The companies join a handful of companies investing in the next-generation bus technology, including Sun and a group of start-ups such as Topspin, Voltaire and InfinCon. Other companies such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM have decided that rather than natively enabling their servers with the nascent technology, they will provide switches like those of InfiniSwitches’ that bridge and route InfiniBand to Gigabit Ethernet networks.

“InfiniBand continues to face the same issues it faced in 2002: the market is largely driven by a dwindling group of start-ups that are searching for market validation from large system vendors, which are reluctant to invest in deep-seeded product plans until customers clamor for the technology,” says Jamie Gruener, senior analyst for the Yankee Group.

“While there are a lot of customers interested in IB, a vast majority don’t understand its value proposition – leaving IB to wallow in vertical market segments where performance pain is acute,” Gruener says. Those markets, Gruener says, are high-performance technical computing, supercomputing and oil and gas exploration.

Gruener says that while the InfiniBand market continues to roll forward, “I can’t seem to see where the market is.”

Paceline, according to sources, is for sale. Voltaire, TopSpin and InfiniCon are shipping products. Last year, Intel, IBM and Microsoft discontinued their InfiniBand development. Last year also saw Omegaband go out of business for lack of funding and InfiniBandsilicon start-up Banderacom shift focus to Gigabit Ethernet.

The combined InfiniSwitch has as many as 80 employees, half of them in Westborough, Mass.; the other half in Austin, Texas. They will continue operations in both offices. No value was placed on the deal.