Voltaire Director Added to IBM Cluster1350 Solution Portfolio

Voltaire Ltd. announced that its Grid Director 20 Gigabits/second (Gbps) switching products have been added to the IBM Cluster1350 solution portfolio, which includes support of iDataPlex, following the completion of a rigorous testing and certification process.

IBM iDataPlex is new category of server that dramatically increases compute density while significantly decreasing energy consumption and associated data center costs for Internet-scale computing.

“With our innovative iDataPlex system design, customers realize significant savings on power and cooling, as well as space,” said Jim Gargan, vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group. “IBM iDataPlex combined with Voltaire 20 Gbps switches provide high-performance InfiniBand connectivity for high performance computing data centers.”

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. Some applications gain up to a 300% performance improvement using Voltaire switches as the cluster interconnect instead of Ethernet. Moreover, the switches’ power-efficient design offers lower power and cooling requirements as compared to 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet offerings.

“IBM’s decision to add Voltaire 20 Gbps switches to their Cluster 1350 portfolio and iDataPlex system underscores the importance of Voltaire products in their cluster and bladed solutions,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire. “Voltaire’s 10 Gbps switches have been available through IBM since 2004 and have been successfully deployed in a broad range of markets including financial services, manufacturing, petroleum, life sciences, government and education.”

Voltaire Grid Director 20 Gbps InfiniBand switches range in size from 24 ports for smaller clusters to 288 ports for large scale-out environments. The switches are currently available through IBM and other Voltaire partners. IBM also offers Voltaire Grid Director 10 Gbps switches, routers and software as part of the Cluster1350 solution portfolio, and 20 Gbps products as part of the IBM BladeCenter product portfolio.