Storage component firm Mellanox Technologies has unveiled the first 40Gbps InfiniBand switch silicon device and product reference platforms.

The company announced the immediate availability of its 36-port, 40Gbps InfiniBand InfiniScale IV switch.

The device is architected to address the scale-out demands of data centres and high-performance compute centres that require the best price-performance and most energy efficient interconnect.

IDC said that switch product development platforms are available for OEMs to accelerate time-to-market of their own systems.

The analyst firm believes that this will fuel the growing InfiniBand switch market, which will have an estimated port shipment compound annual growth rate of 54.5 per cent from 2006 to 2011.

The technology offers "massive scalability to tens of thousands of nodes", according to Eyal Waldman, chief executive at Mellanox Technologies.

"InfiniScale IV-based switch systems and ConnectX adapters will provide the fabric for a number of the world's most powerful supercomputers, and optimise multi-core CPU performance of enterprise and HPC applications," he said.

"These include database, design automation, financial services, grids, health services, media creation, oil and gas, virtualisation, weather analysis, web services and more."

InfiniScale IV integrates management capabilities including congestion control, adaptive routing, multiple subnet support, port monitoring and mirroring, optimising total cluster performance and manageability at any scale.

Production switch systems from OEMs based on the InfiniScale IV are expected to be available later in 2008 from leading server and infrastructure system OEMs.