INDUSTRY

SAN JOSE, CA -- Wide industry support and momentum behind the InfiniBand architecture and product development will be illustrated this week with four live demonstrations at Intel Developer Forum, Fall 2001 in San Jose. Intel Corporation also announced the addition of an InfiniBand test development kit for hardware vendors and the Intel InfiniBand Software Optimization Lab, which is available to software vendors optimizing applications for InfiniBand fabrics. Each of these new programs will enable vendors to develop and tune InfiniBand architecture-ready products. "This is an exciting and pivotal time for InfiniBand technology development," said Tom Macdonald, general manager of the Advanced Components Division of Intel's Enterprise Platform Group. "These demonstrations highlight the tremendous advancement that Intel and the industry have made toward delivery of InfiniBand products, as well as the progress software vendors have made in optimizing their applications for InfiniBand fabrics." The InfiniBand architecture is an I/O infrastructure technology that simplifies and speeds server-to-server connections and links to other server-related systems such as remote storage and networking devices. InfiniBand architecture's easier connectivity, reduced latency, improved bandwidth and enhanced interoperability features increase the performance, reliability and scalability of Intel architecture-based servers to meet the growth needs of emerging e-Business data centers, service providers and server farms. Three Tier Enterprise Solution Demonstration In Thursday's IDF Fall 2001 keynote by Gadi Singer, vice president and general manager of Intel's Enterprise Processors Division, a demonstration featuring Intel host components, IBM DB2, and SAP will show a true three tiered application running on existing IBM X-series hardware. Coupled with switches from InfiniSwitch, QLogic and OmegaBand, this demonstration will illustrate how InfiniBand Architecture and Intel-based platforms deliver a true scale out data center clustered solution. Managed Fabric Enterprise Solution Demonstration Illustrating reduced latency and minimized CPU idle time as a direct result of InfiniBand architecture, this demonstration features an InfiniBand* solution running over an Intel product based InfiniBand fabric with the SAS WebHound* Web analysis application. The first example of integrating InfiniBand specific fabric management into the HP-OpenView enterprise management suite will also be demonstrated. This demonstration highlights InfiniBand-enabled products from, Adaptec, Agilent, Dell, EMC, LSI Logic, OmegaBand, QLogic and Voltaire. 100 Node Interoperability Demonstration First staged at Intel's Interoperability Lab, the world's largest InfiniBand fabric to date features twenty-four vendors and over 100 InfiniBand devices. Shown at the IDF technology showcase, the devices are connected together in a distributed fabric and featuring video on demand, Web hosting, and a database cluster running real enterprise workloads. Clustering Demonstration This InfiniBand architecture-enabled solution stack is based on five standard Dell PowerEdge* servers, each with Intel InfiniBand Host Channel adapters and software, powered by two Intel(R) Pentium (R) III processors, 2 GB RAM and 100 GB disk space per server. The Linux-based IBM DB2 EEE clustered database supports SAP's BW product. Database performance and efficiency is expected to improve dramatically as a result of the underlying InfiniBand fabric. The InfiniBand architecture will enable industry standard clustered and distributed databases to provide scalability and failover. Previously, this type of clustering could only be performed using proprietary interconnect protocols and hardware. This demonstration can be seen in booth 315 at the IDF technology showcase. To accelerate industry development of software optimized for InfiniBand fabrics, Intel also announced the opening of an InfiniBand software optimization lab located at Intel's Utah site. The lab will complement Intel's existing interoperability lab. The lab will allow software vendors to optimize their applications on Intel InfiniBand enabled server platforms and solutions. Intel announced the delivery of test development kits to aid in development of interoperable InfiniBand products. These are a supplement to the InfiniBand product development kits that Intel has been supplying to the industry since February 2001. The kit includes InfiniBand test agents based on the InfiniBand Trade Association's test specifications and will assist developers testing their products for compliance to the InfiniBand architecture specifications. Kits will ship immediately and will be included in the existing product development kit. Intel is one of seven founding companies of the InfiniBand Trade Association, including Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, aiming to deliver products based on a new common I/O specification to deliver a channel-based, switched fabric technology that the entire industry can adopt. To generate broad, industry-wide implementation of an InfiniBand infrastructure, Intel and other key information technology system suppliers are developing a variety of building blocks to support servers, switches, software and connections between storage and networking devices within an InfiniBand fabric. More than 220 companies have joined the InfiniBand Trade Association since its launch in 1999. Additional information about the InfiniBand Trade Association is available at www.infinibandta.org