Voltaire Router Improves FC Performance by 200%

Voltaire Ltd. announced the availability of a new high-performance storage router for unified fabrics. The Voltaire SR4G High Performance Storage Router improves the performance of applications accessing Fibre Channel storage by up to 200% and simplifies connectivity of InfiniBand fabrics to existing Storage Area Networks (SANs).

“The SR4G Storage Router eliminates I/O bottlenecks and provides significantly faster access to Fibre Channel storage,” said Asaf Somekh, Vice President of Strategic Alliances, Voltaire. “Storage intensive applications such as large databases, digital media and entertainment, financial services and oil and gas exploration software can now use 20 Gigabits/second InfiniBand performance with their existing Fibre Channel storage infrastructure.”

By providing connectivity between 20 Gigabits/second InfiniBand and 4 Gigabits/second Fibre Channel, a single Voltaire SR4G High Performance Storage Router provides 1500 MB/second of storage throughput and enables a single server to gain up to a 200% improvement in throughput over a 4 Gigabits/second Fibre Channel connection. The Voltaire SR4G connects to a single InfiniBand adapter eliminating the need for multiple Fibre Channel HBAs in each server, creating significant cost savings. It also uses the iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) protocol to deliver block storage over InfiniBand.

The High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) in Stuttgart, Germany, uses the Voltaire SR4G High-Performance Storage Router to connect their InfiniBand-based scalable file systems with Fibre Channel storage. Several automotive companies are among the users of the system.

“Fast access to storage is critical for large clustered environments running high performance applications,” said Prof. Dr.-Ing. Michael M. Resch, HLRS. “By using the Voltaire SR4G High-Performance Storage Router to connect our InfiniBand fabric to Fibre Channel storage, our storage connectivity is simplified and our manufacturing engineering applications are running faster than ever before. The performance reached using the SR4G in our cluster is unmatched by any other InfiniBand-to-Fibre Channel gateway, both in terms of throughput and number of simultaneous nodes accessing the storage.”

Voltaire SR4G Achieves IBM System Storage Proven Certification
The Voltaire SR4G has successfully completed interoperability testing under the IBM System Storage Proven program. The IBM System Storage Proven program helps customers identify storage solutions and configurations that have been pre-tested for interoperability with IBM’s extensive line of storage products. With completion of the testing on the Voltaire SR4G, IBM customers seeking to deploy high performance, scalable storage have the assurance that their systems will interoperate.

Voltaire Ltd.