Voltaire Plans 40Gb IB Switch

Voltaire Ltd. announced plans to develop a 40 gigabits per second (Gbps)/quad data rate (QDR) switching platform based on the new Mellanox InfiniBand InfiniScale IV switch silicon announced last week. The new silicon enables the design of 40 Gbps InfiniBand switches with higher densities, improved scalability and lower latency than 10 or 20 Gbps InfiniBand switch offerings.

The first of Voltaire’s 40 Gbps switches is expected to be available in late 2008. Voltaire Grid Director switches provide high-performance InfiniBand connectivity and microsecond latencies to enable high-performance applications to run on distributed server, network and storage resources. Moreover, the switches’ power-efficient design offers lower power and cooling requirements as compared to 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet offerings. They are used by customers worldwide in industries including financial services, manufacturing, energy, life sciences and HPC.

“We are aggressively developing products that enable InfiniBand to remain far ahead of competing interconnect technologies in terms of performance and scalability,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire. “40 Gbps InfiniBand will address the specific needs of advanced HPC customers who require the highest bandwidths and lowest latencies to drive their applications.”

Use of InfiniBand as a high-performance server and storage interconnect continues to grow in both the HPC and enterprise data center markets. IDC’s recent InfiniBand forecast estimates a switch port shipment CAGR of 54.5% over 2006 to 2011 with 20 Gbps port shipments surpassing 10 Gbps this year.

“The 40 Gbps switches will join our existing 20 Gbps or DDR InfiniBand portfolio which will continue to be the technology that addresses the performance requirements of the majority of enterprise data centers,” Somekh added.

“We’re working closely with Voltaire on the development of their 40 Gbps InfiniBand switching platforms that will deliver new levels of performance to high-performance and latency sensitive applications,” said Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Together, Mellanox and Voltaire have constructed some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and moving forward we expect 40 Gbps InfiniBand to be the interconnect of choice for future multi-Petaflop clusters.”