France Telecom and General Motors to discuss InfiniBand deployments; featured speaker, John Enck, from leading industry analyst firm to deliver the keynote

SAN FRANCISCO – August 5, 2008 – The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), a global organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand specification, today announced the speakers and agenda for its annual technical forum taking place September 15 at Harrah’s in Las Vegas, NV. Speakers at the “IBTA Technical Forum ‘08: InfiniBand and the Enterprise Data Center” will include several data center end users – France Telecom and General Motors – as well as a keynote by John Enck, managing vice president at Gartner, Inc.

“The demand for increased bandwidth continues to rise in enterprise data centers. IT departments need to address this in order to remain competitive,” said John Enck, managing vice president at Gartner, Inc. “The focus on ways to improve infrastructure performance and efficiency makes the enterprise data center a key market for input/output technologies.”

The IBTA Technical Forum ’08 agenda includes the following sessions and featured speakers:

  • “Grid Computing for TELCO Data Center: InfiniBand the Key Enabler for HPC Cluster,” presented by Thierry Albelda, technical architect at France Telecom
  • “Accelerating Engineering Design Innovation with InfiniBand,” presented by Sharan Kalwani, the global HPC architect and computing infrastructure manager at General Motors
  • “InfiniBand Helps Enterprises and Service Providers to Build a Cost-Effective Cloud

Computing Platform,” presented by Kristof De Spiegeleer, CTO and founder of Q-layer

  • “Oracle Database and InfiniBand Technology,” presented by Paul Tsien, senior product manager, Cluster and Parallel Storage Development Group at Oracle
  • “Citrix XenServer Pass-Through,” presented by Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix
  • “Xen with InfiniBand,” presented by Moiz Kohari, vice president of engineering, Open Platforms Solutions Group at Novell
  • “Multicore CPU, Virtualization and the Need for Higher I/O,” presented by Iddo Kadim, director of virtualization technology at Intel
  • Panel discussion on the future of InfiniBand. Moderator will be John Enck from Gartner and panelists will include executives from Mellanox, QLogic and Voltaire.

The full agenda is posted at http://www.infinibandta.org/events/IBTATechForum08_.

The technical forum is an annual gathering of the IBTA and broader InfiniBand community, including end users, OEMs, hardware and software developers, system architects and product managers. The technical forum will include presentations and collaborative sessions that examine InfiniBand deployments in the enterprise data center and virtualized environments and will emphasize how end users are seeing a positive return on investment.

To register for the technical forum, please visit: www.regonline.com/IBTATechForum08. Registration is available for the early bird rate of $249; after September 1 the rate increases to $299.

About the InfiniBand Trade Association

The InfiniBand Trade Association was founded in 1999 and is chartered with maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand specification. The IBTA is led by a distinguished steering committee that includes Cisco, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, QLogic, Sun and Voltaire. Other members of the IBTA represent leading enterprise IT vendors who are actively contributing to the advancement of the InfiniBand specification. The IBTA actively markets and promotes InfiniBand from an industry perspective through public relations engagements and unites the industry through IBTA-sponsored developer conferences and workshops. For more information on the IBTA, visit www.infinibandta.org.