40Gb IB Director by Voltaire

Voltaire Ltd. announced a 40 Gb/s InfiniBand director-class switch, the Grid Director 4700, which offers the lowest latency in the industry. This switch, and Voltaire’s new advanced management software, Unified Fabric Manager software, provide blazing performance, scalability and ease-of-use for large, high-performance clusters. When used together, the switch and software not only offer the highest performance expected from InfiniBand, but also enterprise-class reliability, high availability and service-level manageability, based on Voltaire’s leadership in bringing high-performance computing into commercial applications and data centers.

 
Part of Voltaire’s 4th generation switch family, the Voltaire Grid Director 4700 features 324 ports of 40 Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity, with the option to double capacity to 648 ports using double-density fabric boards. The double-density fabric boards are the basis for HyperScale architecture, a unique stackable architecture for building larger configurations into the hundreds and thousands of nodes, with lower latency and greater simplicity than alternative solutions. The 19U high Grid Director 4700 has less than 300 nanosecond port-to-port latency to accelerate performance of applications running on server and storage scale-out fabrics. The switch runs a smart distributed software architecture that delivers the best signal quality, enhanced performance optimization, and better resiliency, which are all key challenges in large-scale deployments. Moreover, its low 6.5-watts-per-port power consumption makes the switch a greener choice for energy-efficient data centers.

Voltaire began shipping a 36-port version of the 40 Gb/s switch, the Grid Director 4036, in December, 2008. “We’ve already deployed Voltaire’s 40 Gb/s InfiniBand edge switch and are experiencing improved application performance for our Applications Research and Development cluster, which translates into solving more complex problems in less time,” said Goldi Misra, Head – High Performance Computing Solutions Group, C-DAC, Pune. “A high-port count switch leveraging 40 Gb/s InfiniBand such as the Grid Director 4700 will give us increased bandwidth and throughput to capitalize on the processing power of multi-core servers and scale up to thousands of nodes.”

Advanced Management Software
Further Improves Performance
Voltaire also introduced Unified Fabric Manager software, the industry’s first comprehensive management software to optimize performance of large server and storage scale-out fabrics. Unified Fabric Manager software removes the additional latency that is created in complex environments where multiple applications rely on a single fabric to simultaneously transmit server traffic and access storage. According to Voltaire benchmarks, Unified Fabric Manager software improves latency by as much as 10X in real world environments that run multiple applications and traffic types.

Compatible with Voltaire’s 20 Gb/s and 40 Gb/s switching platforms – including the Grid Director 4700 — Unified Fabric Manager software monitors, analyzes and optimizes fabric performance to improve the efficiency and utilization of large InfiniBand fabrics. Unlike other management software platforms that are device-oriented and involve tedious manual processes, Unified Fabric Manager software provides IT managers with a logical view of their infrastructure. This bridges the traditional gap between servers, applications, and fabric elements, creating a more effective and business-oriented way to manage and scale out high-performance fabrics.

Unified Fabric Manager software efficiently monitors and analyzes fabric bottlenecks and errors, allowing IT managers to quickly identify failures, inefficiencies and performance issues and take corrective action. Unified Fabric Manager software incorporates a unique fabric optimization technology that matches fabric resource allocation and configurations to specific application requirements — leading to reduced congestion, lower latencies, and increased application performance.

“Large fabrics bring a tremendous amount of complexity. Management software that automatically discovers, virtualizes, monitors and optimizes the fabric infrastructure as well as accelerates active applications is a valuable asset to our clusters that scale into the hundreds of nodes,” said Professor Rudolf Lohner, Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT). “Having a centralized view across all of the infrastructure gives us more control over our large-scale environments.”

Unified Fabric Manager software integrates easily in existing environments and has a rich web services API and SDK for easy integration with third-party management platforms.

“Voltaire continues to lead the high-performance server and I/O connectivity market with the availability of the highest performing, high density solutions that deliver 40 Gb/s performance, low latency and scalability,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. “The combination of the Grid Director 4700 and Unified Fabric Manager software not only delivers the best performance for large clusters, but also provides the most management features to simplify scale-out.”

The Grid Director 4700 and Unified Fabric Manager software optimizes I/O throughput for multi-core servers, improving the speed of high-performance computing applications in industries including manufacturing, energy, financial services, life sciences, government, and research and education, leading to greater productivity, improved service levels and higher revenues.

HP’s multi-core Cluster Platforms are among those compatible with Voltaire’s new Grid Director 4700 switch and Unified Fabric Manager software.

“By leveraging high-performance computing solutions to accelerate business processes such as research, engineering or analysis, customers can improve decision making, allowing them to grow their businesses,” said Ed Turkel, manager of product marketing, Scalable Computing and Infrastructure organization, HP. “Together with Voltaire, HP Cluster Platforms significantly increase performance and simplify management for large, complex systems.”

Availability
The Grid Director 4700 and Unified Fabric Manager software will be available in Q2 2009 through OEM partners and resellers.