Many claims have been made over the history of InfiniBand about it becoming the 'new' commodity network interconnect. The first several years of it's existence were met with a great deal of skepticism from various communities that InfiniBand was just another marketing buzzword, and a bunch of vaporware. Now, the hardware exists, and proprietary driver stacks seem to work well in specific environments. Current pricing on HCA's is around $750 a port, and switch pricing is $300 a port. While this pricing is quite competitive for other cluster-specific interconnects, it is dependant on InfiniBand adoption in the Data Center and Enterprise Storage markets. It remains to be seen whether the potential of commodity volume production and raw performance is offset by the additional complexity of the software stack. 10 Gigabit Ethernet has a definite advantage in that drivers for the Intel 10Gig-E card have been in the linux-2.6 kernel series for several months, and other vendors have submitted drivers for inclusion into the mainline kernel.
