Mellanox is one of two major InfiniBand semiconductor suppliers – the other being Qlogic – and also supplies host bus adapters (HBAs). Until now, they’ve been backed by some big names: Dell, IBM, Sun, Vitesse, and several venture cap firms.
This 20% stake of 6M shares means Mellanox now has a market capitalization of $510M, on sales projected by analysts around $50M.
It’s been a good climate for storage IPOs, with Isilon, Double-Take, Riverbend, and CommVault coming public since mid-2006. The news for investors hasn’t been great though: Riverbend has done nicely, doubling since mid-September, but the rest have jogged sideways.
And there may be trouble lurking just over the horizon for Mellanox. Jag Bolaria, a senior analyst at the Linley Group, sees: “With 10-Gbit/s Ethernet coming, that will cast a dark shadow over InfiniBand.” He expects traction for 10GigE in 2008.
InfiniBand is making some headway in supercomputing and blade servers where SANs are important. But the noise is all but gone in VME space.
