On July 18, 2012, Mellanox Technologies announced record revenues, growth and net income. In its press release, Mellanox attributed this growth to a combination of successes “in the HPC, Web 2.0, storage, database, cloud, Big Data and financial services markets.”
In summary, Mellanox reported:

• US$133.5M in revenues for the second fiscal quarter (representing a 111% year-over-year (Y/Y) growth, and a 50% quarter-over-quarter growth);
• US$222.2M in revenues for the first six months of the fiscal year (representing an 88% Y/Y growth);
• A 1,429% Y/Y growth in net income for the second quarter.

NEURALYTIX PERSPECTIVE

Neuralytix believes that this extraordinary growth is not unexpected. Almost all the leading storage vendors have moved to leveraging Infiniband (IB) in some way within their storage infrastructure solutions. Neuralytix expects vendors including Oracle, IBM and even EMC to extend its use of IB in its next generation storage resources. The low-latency, high speed, and relatively low cost (Mellanox claims that the cost per port for IB is competitive against fibre channel (FC) and 10+GbE Ethernet) makes IB an ideal choice for improving performance and scalability of storage systems.

Many end-user organizations looking at different ways that they can leverage the massive growth in data being preserved and seeking ways in which they can create strategic value. One approach is to make investments that can accelerate data processing such that these organizations can minimize time-to-value. The faster an organization can derive value from its data (and data it can access), the faster the organization can benefit from creating an advantage against its competitors – the very definition of Big Data.

Neuralytix defines Big Data as “a set of technologies that creates strategic organization value by leveraging contextualized complete data sets.” Neuralytix also asserts “Big Data: if you’re not doing it, your competitors are.”™

During the course of the next year, Neuralytix believes that Mellanox will continue to post record results. However, Cisco is not likely to accept Mellanox’s growth without a fight; and it will likely stress its leadership position to quiesce Mellanox’s success.