Thanks to the downturn and a few too many ambitious entries, the road map for I/O technology in the data center is as twisted as a wiring closet.
But amid the clutter, a few trends emerged this past week at the Server I/O conference here. Infiniband probably will stay in a small but strategic niche and live to see a significant performance upgrade in 2006. On the motherboard, PCI Express is off to a slow start, while the competing PCI-X will likely be huge in 2004, then slowly fade. And the battle between Ethernet and Fibre Channel in storage networks won't kick into high gear until 2005.
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