The server industry has finally come together and agreed to unite behind a single standard for the next generation of input/output architectures. Yesterday, the promised merge of the separate NGIO and Future I/O efforts was finally agreed upon by seven major vendors – Compaq Computer Corp, Dell Computer Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp, Intel Corp, Microsoft Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc – and a new industry group is to be formed to create a specification combining the best ideas of both, under the name System I/O.
The agreement, which still has to be ratified by the board members of each group, ends a public feud that has been bubbling since January of this year, when the Future I/O Consortium was formed by Compaq, HP and IBM (CI No 3,572). FIO proposed alternative technology to that proposed by the Intel-led NGIO group, backed by Dell, Hitachi Data Systems Ltd, NEC Corp, Siemens Computer Systems and Sun. Both had fundamental problems with the other’s spec. NGIO was criticized for being too slow and not having sufficient bandwidth for next generation applications. FIO was said to be too far off and too expensive to implement, and the FIO members were proposing to charge royalties to server manufacturers using their spec.
Not all those issues have been fully resolved, but working groups are to be set up over the next few weeks to hammer them out. The seven companies preferred to talk about the similarities of their two approaches rather than the differences. The merged specification will provide a common channel-based system area network switch fabric to support both conventional server I/O and inter-process communication among parallel clusters – as opposed to the shared bus architectures mostly used today. The new architecture should also provide additional system performance, reliability and availability for servers and peripherals such as storage and networking devices.
Scaling from entry-level servers through to high-end systems, the combined architecture will use interoperable links with aggregate bandwidths of 500MB/sec, 2GB/sec, and 6GB/sec and a 2.5Gb/sec wire signaling rate. Compatible upgrades to higher performance products are planned for the future.
The result of the compromise is that systems will not now appear until the 2001 timeframe – more FIO’s timescale than NGIO’s, which was originally talking about systems by next year. A 1.0 specification will still be out by the end of the year. No license fees will be charged to non members. The new group plans an event in late September or early October to update the industry and solicit involvement.
