Quoting from the Mellanox official announcement:
Mellanox Technologies Ltd, the leader in business and technical computing interconnects, announced the immediate availability of a 10Gb/s InfiniBand® adapter card priced at $125 for OEM volume purchase orders.
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A single InfiniBand HCA card in each server and storage node is the only I/O adapter required to interconnect a highly scalable and reliable grid, as opposed to several multi-port Enterprise Gigabit Ethernet NICs and Fibre Channel HBAs. InfiniBand I/O consolidation simplifies cabling, eases system management, eliminates unnecessary fabric infrastructure equipment, reduces power, and delivers optimal total cost of ownership (TCO).
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Virtual infrastructure solutions, like those from industry leader VMware, when deployed over InfiniBand will facilitate off-the-shelf data center applications such as CRM, ERP, order processing, financial, payroll, inventory management, and others to run transparently while realizing the inherent benefits of I/O consolidation and performance increase of a high bandwidth, low-latency interconnect. As part of the VMware Community Source program, Mellanox is taking a leadership position in cooperative development of high performance virtual infrastructure solutions based on VMware ESX Server.“InfiniBand’s ability to partition I/O to multiple end-points, and consolidate I/O across data center applications holds the promise for added flexibility and cost savings within VMware environments,” said Bernie Mills, senior director of developer programs at VMware. “Mellanox has a clear commitment to delivering cost-effective virtual infrastructure solutions and has been actively involved in the VMware Community Source program since its inception. We continue to look forward to working with them in concert with other InfiniBand vendors within the community.”