Re: Monopoly?
> I'm not trying to advocate a monopoly, but the market data does not look good for Mellanox in spite it being the superior product.
Mellanox had a very large headway - nearly a decade - to make Infiniband popular.
Unfortunately, they did their level best to kill all possible grass roots uptake by ensuring SysAdmin's, Hobbiests, etc couldn't use the gear unless it came directly from them.
Mellanox (on purpose) drop driver support for any cards that are not current models for sale, and remove their older drivers.
So, the large supply of super cheap Mellanox cards cards on Ebay (for years)... were useless for the majority of people.
It's a good thing FreeBSD and Linux included working drivers in the OS distribution, as if it was up to Mellanox they'd have stopped that too.
Ask a question on their "Community" forums about a non-current model, and you're told it's an old card, ending the "conversation".
End result... most SysAdmin's & System Architects haven't ever played with Infiniband, so when the time comes to include or recommend network gear for new projects, guess what's never included as it's "exotic"? The only place it then gets a look in, is for things where "exotic" is ok.
A decade of consistently doing this, and it's literally no wonder Infiniband never "caught on" despite being the better tech. Friggin Morons for their "Sales and Marketing" leadership. "Short term thinking" played out for a decade.