IBM's increased interest in InfiniBand could help in making the high-speed interconnect technology, heretofore confined primarily to high-performance-computing applications, more easily available to a broader enterprise audience.

IBM last week said it had entered into a five-year deal to resell Topspin Communications Inc.'s InfiniBand switches for use with its mainframe zSeries servers; Intel Corp.-based xSeries systems; and pSeries servers, which run on IBM's Power processors. IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., also will use Topspin switches in its storage products.

IBM will have access to Topspin's 10G-bps switches, and the 30G-bps switches are due later this year. Some 30G-bps products will be shown this week at LinuxWorld in New York, said officials at Topspin, of Mountain View, Calif.

Topspin, which entered into a reseller deal in March of last year with Sun Microsystems Inc., makes switches and adapters designed to integrate the high-bandwidth, low-latency technology into data centers. Fujitsu Ltd., based in Tokyo, will join IBM and Sun in reselling InfiniBand products. Fujitsu last week said it will use InfiniCon Systems Inc.'s InfiniBand switches in its high-availability cluster offerings for enterprises.

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