Oracle yesterday bought a 10.2% stake in InfiniBand (IB) supplier Mellanox, an investment that publicly affirms the vitality of InfiniBand. IB’s success has not been overlooked by the stock market — Mellanox stock is up 200% over the past two years (vs. 50% for Cisco, for example). But strangely, IB’s growth has been overlooked by technologists, some of whom have predicted its demise. The debate over IB has been long, and with Oracle in the game the debate may now grow louder.

So why would Oracle make this investment?

They would clearly do this only if IB was a great fit for their vision for the future of computing.

The Oracle vision is naturally built around Oracle: one where all applications run fluidly across homogeneous groups of Sun servers. But aside from being closed and single-vendor centric, this vision isn’t all that different from where everyone else is going. A private cloud, after all, consists of apps running fluidly above a hypervisor on similarly-built x86 servers.

So what is it about IB that makes it a good fit in this world? Here are four reasons:

1) IB delivers substantially more throughput

40Gb solutions have been shipping for almost two years, meaning 4X the performance of 10G is available, mature and cost-effective. A single Nehalem-based server can push over 20G of I/O — Xsigo demonstrated at VMworld 2009 that — so the need is real.  Furthermore, the IB roadmap extends beyond 300G.

2) IB is ideal for high-transaction environments

IB latency is measured in nanoseconds, not microseconds as with Ethernet.

3) IB complements virtualization

When you run 20, 30, or 50 applications on a server, it is bound to drive bandwidth demand, especially when those apps might include Oracle, SQL, and Exchange. VMware identifies bandwidth capacity as a key element of  successful virtualization projects (view video here) and points out how IB capacity provides advantages over 10G Ethernet.

4) IB enables the cloud

A cloud infrastructure requires that large clusters share access to common network and storage resources, which is exactly what IB was designed for. It is scalable to thousands of nodes.

Larry Ellison summed it up in Oracle’s announcement of the deal: “InfiniBand is by far the fastest and most efficient switch fabric for running enterprise data centers.”

IB is offered by virtually every server maker, and has been for some time. And now Oracle owns a piece of that business. The often contentious nature of  any discussions involving Oracle suggests that the IB debate just got some new energy. But this investment makes a strong case for technology superiority. And at the very least should finally settle the arguments about market viability.