'We did a demo of InfiniBand in 2001, and that's when we thought InfiniBand would be the next big thing. Then it went into the valley of death,' said Steve Gardner, director of product marketing at Engenio.

Companies such as King of Prussia, Pa.-based SilverStorm -- formerly known as InfiniCon Systems Inc. -- also released InfiniBand switches early in the game. In 2002, SilverStorm introduced a switch that acted as a server interconnect that could reduce external connections in high-availability server clusters by up to 50 percent.

Earlier this month, SilverStorm announced plans to introduce a switch with 20Gbit/sec. throughput in the first quarter of 2006.