A strengthening upgrade cycle within big data centers is benefiting companies like Mellanox, which ended the quarter with $217.4m in cash and short-term investments. Also noted in this report on The Register, is that Mellanox 10 GE and 40 GE adapters for servers will support the new RDMA over Converged Ethernet protocol that the InfiniBand Trade Association announced earlier this week.
“The cheapest way to enter the 10 GE switch market might be to acquire Voltaire, which is within Mellanox’ reach financially given that Voltaire has a current market capitalization of $124m and had about $44.6m in cash and equivalents at the end of the December quarter. With Voltaire not profitable in both 2008 and 2009 (on an annual basis), there may never be a better time to buy Voltaire. And if Mellanox can’t see that, maybe the private equity firm, Garnett & Helfrich Capital, behind Blade Network Technologies can see it and will make a move.
“In a separate announcement, Mellanox said that its 10 GE and 40 GE adapters for servers will support the new RDMA over Converged Ethernet protocol that the InfiniBand Trade Association announced earlier this week. The RoCE protocol basically uses a tweaked version of the InfiniBand drivers from the OpenFabrics Alliance’s, called the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) collectively, to allow InfiniBand’s Remote Direct Memory Access protocol – the secret sauce that gives InfiniBand such low latency – to run on a server but communicate through Ethernet adapters that support lossless data transmission.”
