Voltaire With Panasas

Voltaire Ltd. is working with Panasas, Inc. The companies recently completed cross-certification testing of Voltaire Grid Director switches and InfiniBand-to-10-Gigabit-Ethernet gateways with the Panasas ActiveStor 6000 Parallel Storage Cluster. Used together, the products can deliver full-rated throughput using an efficient unified fabric configuration that reduces overall system costs.

The Voltaire-Panasas solution enables very high performance storage access for large, scale-out cluster computing architectures using Voltaire 20 Gb/s InfiniBand switches for the server interconnect and Voltaire InfiniBand-to-10-Gigabit-Ethernet gateways to provide connectivity to the Panasas storage. The solution removes the bottlenecks typically associated with clustered storage and reduces costs because only one InfiniBand adapter is used in each server, eliminating the need to install costly 10 GbE network interface cards on all of the servers or to implement complicated ‘work-arounds’ using servers as I/O gateways.

“Working with Voltaire, we’ve developed a really elegant storage solution for large-scale clustered environments that we’ve already begun deploying at customer sites,” said Don Grabski, director of product management, Panasas. “During our certification process, we tested the solution on a 32-node cluster and achieved very good performance results that will make a difference for application performance in real-world HPC environments. The four Panasas AS6000 module configuration with the Voltaire Grid Director switches and InfiniBand-to-10-Gigabit-Ethernet gateways are capable of read performance in excess of 2GB/second.”

Voltaire Grid Director switches provide high-performance 20 Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity and microsecond latencies to enable high-performance applications fully utilize distributed server, network and storage resources. Combining Voltaire switches with a Voltaire InfiniBand-to-10-Gigabit-Ethernet gateway enables line speed access from the servers to storage resources.

“The Voltaire-Panasas solution delivers compelling advancements for storage access in scale-out environments, in terms of both performance and efficiency,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president, strategic alliances, Voltaire. “By using InfiniBand as a unified fabric that delivers server and storage traffic on a single wire, customers are gaining speed and scalability for their applications while avoiding the excessive costs associated with using multiple NICs in the servers.”

Availability
High performance storage solutions from Voltaire and Panasas are available today through Voltaire’s OEM and reseller partners, and from Panasas and its partners.