Voltaire Unveils 40-Gbit/s InfiniBand Swiches

BILLERICA, Mass. and HERZLIYA, Israel -- Voltaire Ltd. (NASDAQ: VOLT), a leading provider of scale-out computing fabrics for data centers, today announced a 40 Gb/s InfiniBand director-class switch, the Grid Director 4700, which offers the lowest latency in the industry. This switch, and Voltaires new advanced management software, Unified Fabric Manager™ software, provide blazing performance, scalability and ease-of-use for large, high-performance clusters. When used together, the switch and software not only offer the highest performance expected from InfiniBand, but also enterprise-class reliability, high availability and service-level manageability, based on Voltaire’s leadership in bringing high-performance computing into commercial applications and data centers.

Part of Voltaire’s 4th generation switch family, the Voltaire Grid Director 4700 features 324 ports of 40 Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity, with the option to double capacity to 648 ports using double-density fabric boards. The double-density fabric boards are the basis for HyperScale™ architecture, a unique stackable architecture for building larger configurations into the hundreds and thousands of nodes, with lower latency and greater simplicity than alternative solutions. The 19U high Grid Director 4700 has less than 300 nanosecond port-to-port latency to accelerate performance of applications running on server and storage scale-out fabrics. The switch runs a smart distributed software architecture that delivers the best signal quality, enhanced performance optimization, and better resiliency, which are all key challenges in large-scale deployments. Moreover, its low 6.5-watts-per-port power consumption makes the switch a greener choice for energy-efficient data centers.

Voltaire began shipping a 36-port version of the 40 Gb/s switch, the Grid Director 4036, in December, 2008. “We’ve already deployed Voltaire’s 40 Gb/s InfiniBand edge switch and are experiencing improved application performance for our Applications Research and Development cluster, which translates into solving more complex problems in less time,” said Goldi Misra, Head - High Performance Computing Solutions Group, C-DAC, Pune. “A high-port count switch leveraging 40 Gb/s InfiniBand such as the Grid Director 4700 will give us increased bandwidth and throughput to capitalize on the processing power of multi-core servers and scale up to thousands of nodes.”

Voltaire Inc.