A flood of interconnect technologies will continue to roil server design as the latest entrant, Infiniband, continues its slow rollout, speakers said at the Infrastructure Server I/O Conference in Monterey, Calif.

As it rides out what analysts and industry luminaries have called "the perfect storm"—the marketplace confluence of Infiniband, PCI-X, Fibre Channel, and iSCSI—the next generation of servers looks to have room enough for all of the interconnect technologies in question.

Speakers at the conference called for patience with regard to the nascent Infiniband spec, currently in its "heavy-lifting" phase of further iterations and infrastructure buildout. In the short term, the rise of Infiniband at the expense of fellow interconnect technologies looks to be less drastic than some had expected.

Greg Brashier, vice president of industry development at market research firm Strategic Research Corp., Santa Barbara, Calif., said he believes that as more peripherals move outside of the box—a trend that began with the emergence of network-attached storage—Infiniband will be well-positioned to exploit that development, positing the server as a processing unit.

But the advent of Infiniband and IP Storage for network-based storage systems as the standard attachment configuration won't drastically impact PCI's massive installed base, at least not in the near future, he said. IP Storage involves the layering, tunneling or encapsulation of SCSI or Fibre Channel traffic over TCP/IP.

"The idea that Infiniband or IP Storage is coming along doesn't mean, in our view, that PCI is going away," Brashier said. "At any given time in the future, there will be more than one structure for I/O in virtually every server that's out there."

That disaggregation looks to favor IP Storage adoption, which will outpace Infiniband by a factor of four by 2004, with an installed base of about 40 percent of total new server shipments, he said.

"We believe that Infiniband has incredibly long legs, and if this were a marathon, it would be a stellar performer," Brashier said. "[But] we believe IP Storage will come up sooner, faster, so you'll probably have to deal with both of those—and not only those. Fibre Channel is not going away, and PCI is a force that will have to be reckoned with for a long time to come.

"It's not as easy as saying, 'Pick the horse and ride it.' They're all going to finish. Or, in the perfect storm, every wave is going to continue to build, continue to crest."

Wendy Vittori, general manager of the I/O and bridges division of Intel Corp. (stock: INTC) agreed that the many interconnect technologies will co-exist and serve different segments. Vittori said she believes the picture will remain cloudy until the coming period of experimentation irons out interoperability questions.

As the rate of data traffic increases at a phenomenal pace, the needs of the Internet infrastructure will likewise evolve, she said.

"My view is we're just at the beginning of understanding what this Internet infrastructure is going to have to be," Vittori said. "If we look at five years ago, I think it's true, in retrospect, that no matter what any of us thought, we were wrong."

Citing the competitive structure of the PC world, Vittori called for greater industry cooperation, or co-opetition, wherein the "horizontalization" of the industry breeds layers of competency working together to provide a total end solution.

"We don't need another industry group to solve this particular challenge," she said. "This is a time of transition, and like all times of transition, it's going to be messy. I wish you could just pick a particular direction to go down. We do not believe that we understand the whole requirement yet, and therefore, there's a period of experimentation with these new technologies that's inevitable."

Michael Krause, senior interconnect architect at Hewlett-Packard Co. (stock: HWP), said he believes marketing hype, more than anything else, has been responsible for the perceived interconnect technology wars.

"I've seen analysis that 80 percent of all servers will be Infiniband by 2004," Krause said. "I don't believe that's reality."

He said he believes that while 80 percent of the design points for servers will have an Infiniband solution in place by 2004, that doesn't suggest that PCI is out of gas.

"It's going to take several years to exploit all that Infiniband has to offer; it's a more comprehensive architecture than most people may realize," he said. "The complexity of the value chain that needs to be done is such that I don't see it dominating the market."

By 2004, PCI-X will be at equal volume to Infiniband, Krause said.

Infiniband can disaggregate the server and break out the processor memory complex while solving certain power density problems in data centers, Krause acknowledged, but it can't solve every problem.

"There are a lot of things that Infiniband is missing," he said. "It needs to improve its management infrastructure; it's missing some of the basic protocols that need to be there, like a router protocol. To really take it the next step further, you're going to need to fill in this value chain."

The need for an open API on the software side is also a pressing issue to ensure the fulfillment of the value chain, Krause said, but that effort may hit some snags along the way.

"Not everybody believes in creating open APIs," he said. "Some major software players like to do everything their own way. That creates a real problem for companies, like mine, that have a multiple-OS strategy. We support Unix, Linux, and Windows, and not all of those are going to be able to interoperate. That's a major concern with us."

HP will work with companies both in and outside the Infiniband Trade Association to create open APIs, he said.

Executives at Infiniband software startup Vieo Inc., Austin, Texas, echoed Krause's sentiments.

"For some reason, there don't seem to be any APIs defined for Infiniband," said Jim Mott, chief technical officer of Vieo. "That has forced us to implement existing APIs that run over Infiniband, which means that existing applications stand a chance of working pretty much unchanged."

Renato Recio, a senior technical staff member at IBM, Armonk, N.Y., believes that while such current underlying technologies as PCI will scale for the next four or five years, Infiniband can immediately serve as an alternative solution to existing IPC networks.

"Then I don't have to solve partitioning, I don't have to solve booting, I don't even have to solve all the management issues," Recio said.

Infiniband will serve as a PCI replacement down the road, he said, but software issues may put bumps in that route.

"I don't know if the people developing software want to give you API access," Recio said. "There are just some companies where APIs are an issue."

But Vieo's Mott said that the reason his company was formed in the first place—indeed, the imperative driving Infiniband's existence—is that Infiniband presents a hardware solution to a hardware problem.

"It solves hardware problems like heat and power and number of slots to feed a hungry multiple-GHz CPU with multiple gigabytes of memory," Mott said. "It's going to be there because it solves the hardware guys' problems; and in typical fashion, when hardware problems get solved, the [hardware side] throws a lot over the wall to us software guys."

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