Oracle has announced that it has invested in servers and storage systems end-to-end connectivity solutions provider Mellanox, acquiring %10.2 of the company’s ordinarily shares. This step, clearly and undeniably aimed to further strengthen the two’s partnership is seemingly a positive one, as Mellanox’s InfiniBand is a, if not the switch fabric leader for enterprise and high-preference computing, and is involved with some of Oracle’s own offerings.

“”InfiniBand is by far the fastest and most efficient switch fabric for running enterprise data centers,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.”Mellanox has been instrumental in maintaining InfiniBand’s immense competitive lead over Ethernet. We are a big supporter of the company and this investment based upon our belief in the InfiniBand technology and in the Mellanox management team.”

Enabling greater scalability and throughput as well as decreased latency compared to others, InfiniBand products are strongly involved with Oracle’s Exadata and Exalogic.  On the other hand, Oracle’s Solaris is intended to be strongly incorporated in Mellanox’s response to increasing customers demand. This is the stuff good IT partnerships are made from, but that doesn’t Mellanox is entirely monogamist. The company is also providing its services to Dell, HP, IBM and others, which may or may not decrease the value behind Oracle’s intention not to acquire and takeover the small-town InfiniBand architect.

Forcing the competition to use second grade anything is always a good move, but if that’s the cost (on top of a %10.2 acquisition) of a healthy partnership, so be it.  There is a great deal of ever-obvious, investment-justifying and long-term value in Mellanox for Oracle, requiring a lot of articulately- orchestrated and announced business moves.