Availability of Voltaire-Supported WinOF 2.0

Voltaire Ltd. announced the availability of support for WinOF software version 2.0. Using Voltaire WinOF 2.0, virtually any Windows-based server application including Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 and other Windows operating systems can seamlessly use InfiniBand and benefit from its heightened performance.

The Voltaire WinOF 2.0 distribution includes software for database clustering, high performance computing, communications, and storage applications. This collection consists of drivers, protocols, and management applications, based on the open source WinOF software suite from the OpenFabrics Alliance and is a necessary component for operating InfiniBand fabrics in Windows environments. Voltaire has been a lead developer for OpenFabrics since its inception and contributes updates to the software on a continuous basis.

Voltaire WinOF 2.0 offers all of the features available in the OpenFabrics distribution along with the availability of additional fixes and patches that have been discovered during the Voltaire testing and certification process. WinOF 2.0 offers newly added support for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, including Microsoft’s NetworkDirect interface that improves the performance of HPC applications, as well as features that allow easier porting of applications from Linux to Windows. Voltaire has improved on the software’s ease of deployment and use by including automatic driver installation, flexibility for registering Windows drivers and PDF documentation. Voltaire’s enhancements to WinOF are continually contributed back to the OpenFabrics developer community so they may be used in future versions of WinOF, in order to maintain interoperability of InfiniBand fabrics.

“The availability of WinOF 2.0 brings InfiniBand’s high performance and scalability to Windows HPC Server 2008 and other Windows environments,” said Ryan Waite, Windows HPC server product unit manager, Microsoft Corp. “Voltaire’s additional testing and ease-of-use features give our customers the ability to achieve optimal results using Voltaire InfiniBand in their Windows HPC environments.”

Voltaire WinOF 2.0 software is a part of Voltaire’s complete hardware and software solution for Windows. Combined with Voltaire’s InfiniBand switches and IP and storage gateway products, Voltaire WinOF 2.0 creates a comprehensive solution that enhances the scalability and simplifies the deployment of clusters of Windows-based servers. It significantly increases system communication rates 10 to 60 times over traditional methods, and improves the performance of applications running in clustered environments.

“Voltaire’s experience bringing InfiniBand to enterprise customers – particularly in the financial services industry – helped influence our contributions to WinOF 2.0 which focused heavily on ease of use and deployment,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire. “Now, heavily Windows-based industries including financial services, manufacturing, academia, aerospace and life sciences, can benefit from the improvements in application performance and infrastructure efficiency that InfiniBand delivers.”

Availability
The installation package for Voltaire WinOF 2.0 will be available at the end of November and can be downloaded.