InfiniBand Group Prepares Developers Conference and Plugfest

Executives at the InfiniBand Trade Association said Tuesday the organization was readying activities in an effort to make connectivity solutions available as soon as possible.

Organization executives said at the Storage Networking World conference here this week that the InfiniBand Trade Association will hold its next developers conference from June 19 to 27 in Orlando, Fla.

Members of the organization are also expected to hold a "plugfest," in which various vendors get together for a behind-closed-doors session of connecting their products together to test interoperability, from June 5 to June 7 in Milpitas, Calif., said Jim Pappas, director of initiative marketing at Intel's Enterprise Platform Group.

The InfiniBand Trade Association is also instituting an IT training program to teach IT users about the benefits of InfiniBand, said Pappas. "Our efforts to date have been focused on developers," he said. "Now we're saying it's time to start educating the public."

InfiniBand is a switched fabric-based I/O architecture aimed at high-performance connectivity and scalability of servers and storage, offering data throughput from 500 MBps to 6 GBps. The InfiniBand Trade Association was founded in 1999 by Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.