Voltaire 40Gb InfiniBand Switches Available

Voltaire Ltd. announced a new family of quad data rate (QDR), 40 Gb/s switches that bring heightened levels of bandwidth and performance to high-performance clustered systems. In addition, Voltaire’s new Grid Director 4000 line of switches features unique ‘smart’ design elements to meet the needs of next-generation data centers delivering key benefits such as increased scalability, improved energy efficiency and expanded management capabilities.

Voltaire’s new Grid Director 4036 switch, with its compact, energy-efficient design, delivers 40 Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity and ultra-low latency to accelerate application performance in data centers.

Grid Director 4036
        
The first of Voltaire’s switches in the Grid Director 4000 family is the Grid Director 4036, specifically designed to meet the scale-out, energy-efficiency and ease-of-use requirements of modern data centers. The Grid Director 4036 features 36 ports of 40 Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity and ultra-low latency to accelerate performance of applications running on clusters of servers and storage.

With its smaller footprint — measuring only 15 inches deep and weighing only 16.9 lbs — the Grid Director 4036’s 1U chassis is only half the depth of previous generations. Its configurable air-flow direction, low 10-watts-per-port power consumption, and redundant AC or DC power options allow the switch to easily integrate into highly dense and energy-efficient data center deployments while also plugging into standard and optimized racks.

With increased 40 Gb/s speeds comes faster signaling rates. Voltaire’s design of the Grid Director 4036 incorporates unique software capabilities to optimize signal quality and lower bit error rates, which enable the use of multiple cable types or vendors and extended cable lengths for flexible, scale-out architectures.

The Grid Director 4036 also incorporates software-based management including device and subnet management to simplify operations, and advanced adaptive routing and congestion management that provide better throughput and sustainable application performance. These are important capabilities for unified fabric deployments in which mixed loads of cluster, storage and network traffic run on a single InfiniBand wire. The switch also enables in-band or out-of-band remote access for monitoring, software updates, troubleshooting or configuration.

“Improved processing power and massive scalability are critical to advancing petascale scientific simulation capabilities in a multitude of scientific and engineering disciplines,” said Matt Leininger, Deputy for Advanced Technology Projects, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. “Switches using QDR InfiniBand significantly increase bandwidth and messaging rates and improve switch throughput under heavy loads with adaptive routing. These advances will enable us to better utilize multicore processing technologies by efficiently scaling our Linux clusters into the thousands of nodes.”

The Grid Director 4036 optimizes I/O throughput for multi-core servers, improving the performance of high performance computing applications in industries including manufacturing, energy, financial services, life sciences, government, and research and education, where increased speed translates to greater productivity, improved service levels and higher revenues. Additional director-class switches are planned for release in the second quarter of 2009.

“Voltaire continues to lead the high-performance server and I/O connectivity market with the availability of the highest performing, highest density switching solutions that deliver 40 Gb/s performance, low latency and scalability,” said Patrick Guay, Executive Vice President Global Sales and General Manager of Voltaire, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Voltaire Ltd. “The Grid Director 4000 family represents Voltaire’s fourth generation of switching platforms, which incorporate not only the best performance InfiniBand has to offer, but also have a ‘smart’ design with physical characteristics and software-based capabilities that enhance scalability and manageability and reduce power consumption.”

“Customers can increase business productivity by leveraging high performance computing solutions together with network bandwidth optimization products to accelerate application performance,” said Ed Turkel, Manager of Product Marketing, Scalable Computing and Infrastructure organization, HP. “Voltaire’s Grid Director 4036 QDR switch allows customers to take advantage of the true power of HP’s multi-core and multi-processor servers by eliminating network bottlenecks and optimizing I/O throughput.”

Pricing
With a list price of less than $400/port, the Grid Director 4036 marks a new low price point for InfiniBand, an interconnect technology that delivers unsurpassed application performance by delivering high bandwidth and low latency and eliminating I/O bottlenecks. Customers can now get 40 Gb/s bandwidth at pricing that is 40-60 percent below other interconnect technologies.

Availability
The Grid Director 4036 is the first of Voltaire’s family of QDR products and will be available in December through Voltaire OEM partners and resellers. Additional director-class QDR switches are expected to be available in Q2 of 2009.