Cost of 10 GbE versus IB

Posted Dec 7, 2011 20:39 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

As far as I can see the InfiniBand equipment has a lower price, lower latency and higher bandwidth. Or did I miss something ?

Well, yes. 10GbE is still Ethernet - volume technology. Not only it's easier to find cheap stuff on the net (something like NC550SFP for $452.27), it's easier to get a discount (if you are buying in bulk), too.

And prices for GbE are still falling, as was already noted, for IB... not so much.

This being said right now, today, it's not always cheaper to use 10GbE as compared to IB: it all depend on the prices which you personally can manage to get. But it's only prudent to support technology which can become quite cheap later.

Note that while symmetric 10GbE switches are still rare and expensive, but asymmetric ones (a lot of 1GbE ports and couple of 10GbE ports to plug your servers into) have already arrived in bulk. This is exactly how 1GbE arrived on scene 10 years ago - and today it's dirt cheap, I don't see why 10GbE will not repeat this feat while I just can not see how IB can ever be dirt cheap: it's too specialized.