InfiniBand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiniBand

infiniband - The high performance interconnect by Mellanox

Infiniband is actually a standard and Mellanox became the go to supplier. However in the early stages there were many more suppliers.

Intel bought one of the IB players and for all I know killed it.

Intel bought Qlogic, made some proprietary enhancements to their IB tech, which they now sell under the omni-path brand.

By Voltaire, the infiniband company acquired by mellanox :)

Their ethernet accelerator VMA stands for "Voltaire Messaging Accelerator".

IIRC Mellanox was always doing Infiniband; they made the hardware and Voltaire wrote the drivers (before people understood open source and created OFED).

Mellanox made the HCAs (aka network cards) and Voltaire made the switches. Mellanox had their own drivers and their own MOFED (their incompatible fork of openfabrics upstream OFED with Mellanox specific enhancements).

We just pulled a Voltaire switch from our data center. They definitely made hardware. Or at least put their name on it.