Emulex sets its sights on high-performance computing

23 May 2012

A new partnership with Myricom sees the company launch three new products for low-latency, high-performance environments, where the choice is generally between Ethernet and Infiniband – for now.

Emulex seems to think so and it’s aiming to grab a slice of the HPC action, via its new partnership with HPC specialist Myricom. Earlier this month, the two companies announced their new alliance, along with a trio of products, the Emulex OneConnect Network Xceleration family.

Myricom is the David to Emulex’s Goliath in this partnership: as a privately held company, it doesn’t reveal revenues, but they are doubtless dwarfed by Emulex’s $452m in annual sales.

What it brings to the party, however, is highly valuable: networking technology that already delivers extreme-performance Ethernet to the HPC world. This is based on Myricom’s Ethernet cards and its three network acceleration software packages, each engineered for different use-cases: FastStack DBL, for financial trading environments; FastStack Sniffer10G, for network security/surveillance environments; and FastStack VideoPump, for video streaming and digital content delivery.

For its own part, Ethernet brings ‘market reach’ to the partnership, as well as sales and marketing clout. The larger company will be able to introduce Myricom’s technology to a wider audience (albeit under the Emulex OneConnect name), via its direct salesforce and its established channel infrastructure. No Emulex technology is included at this stage – so it’s more of a commercial collaboration right now than a technological one, although that seems likely to change over time. 

Either way, will this partnership be effective in luring HPC network admins to the Ethernet camp? It’s hard to say and market signs regarding Infiniband’s future are mixed. This year, Intel returned to the Infiniband market after abandoning it a decade earlier, with its purchase of the Infiniband business of storage networking specialist QLogic. Meanwhile, Infiniband specialist Mellanox has been selling Ethernet network cards and switches since last year.

At the same time, Crehan Research, a research company specializing in data centre networking, predicts that the Ethernet-based HPC market is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 63 percent between now and the end of 2016.  And last year, Juniper Networks entered into an HPC partnership with Chelsio, a direct competitor of Myricom.

“Organisations looking for low latency solutions should consider the advantages of consolidating onto a common Ethernet platform because as data centers grow in size and complexity, achieving simplicity while driving down costs and overhead will become very important,” says Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

In addition, the Ethernet ecosystem (products and services) is far larger than that for InfiniBand, as is the skills base, with Ethernet network admins much easier to find. Either way, this will be a race to the finish. 

You might also be interested in:

Big leaps forward in bandwidth

Building blocks of the data centre: server, storage and networking stacks

Today’s networks – more prehistoric than dinosaurs?