Marketing program, including new branding logo, being introduced to vendors with InfiniBand™ products that pass rigorous compliance testing

InfiniBand® Trade Association Expands Branding and Reach of Integrators’ List
Marketing program, including new branding logo, being introduced to vendors with InfiniBand™ products that pass rigorous compliance testing

SUPERCOMPUTING 2008, AUSTIN, Texas – Nov. 19, 2008 – The InfiniBand® Trade Association (IBTA), a global organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand™ specification, today announced it will be expanding the branding of its Integrators’ List by rolling out a marketing program available to all vendors with InfiniBand products that pass rigorous compliance testing.

The Integrators’ List is a compilation of all products that have been tested and accepted by the IBTA as being compliant with the InfiniBand architecture specification. The new marketing program includes a logo available for use in press releases, advertising materials, and to affix to cables and/or devices.

“Compliance programs such as the IBTA’s Integrators’ List provide a real value to end users by clarifying which products have been independently tested and verified as performing well in certain high performance computing and enterprise environments,” said Jie Wu, research manager, technical computing at IDC. “The expansion of the IBTA’s Integrators’ List program continues to raise the bar of products developed for the InfiniBand specification.”

The new logo will first be used on products that passed the tests at the 14th InfiniBand™ Compliance and Interoperability Plugfest, which took place September 22 – 26, 2008 at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH. It was the first Plugfest event to test quad data rate (QDR) products which can achieve data rates of 40 Gb/s – significantly faster than the maximum rate of Ethernet products which are limited to 10 Gb/s. Double data rate (DDR) and single data rate (SDR) products – including cables, host channel adapters, switches and storage devices – were also tested.

“The Integrators’ List has been around for five years and is greatly respected and coveted within the InfiniBand community,” said Chet Mehta, distinguished engineer at IBM Corporation, and co-chair of the IBTA Steering Committee. “The addition of this marketing program will greatly enhance the benefits to InfiniBand product manufacturers, and enable easy recognition of end user-requested, InfiniBand-compliant products.”

With the introduction of the Integrators’ List marketing program, end users of InfiniBand cables and devices will be able to easily identify those products which have passed compliance testing and are qualified for use in high performance computing and enterprise environments. Manufacturers of InfiniBand equipment will be given additional recognition for achieving Integrators’ List status.

The IBTA Integrators’ List is designed to support data center managers, CIOs and other IT professionals with their planned deployment of InfiniBand architecture solutions. More information on the IBTA Integrators’ List or you can contact the InfiniBand Trade Association media liaison at media@infinibandta.org.

About the InfiniBand Trade Association
The InfiniBand Trade Association was founded in 1999 and is chartered with maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand specification. The IBTA is led by a distinguished steering committee that includes Cisco, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, QLogic, Sun, and Voltaire. Other members of the IBTA represent leading enterprise IT vendors who are actively contributing to the advancement of the InfiniBand specification. The IBTA markets and promotes InfiniBand from an industry perspective through public relations engagements and unites the industry through IBTA-sponsored developer conferences and workshops. For more information on the IBTA, visit www.infinibandta.org.