Voltaire Delivers SSI-Compliant 40Gb IB Blade Switch

Voltaire Ltd. announced the industry’s first Server System Infrastructure (SSI)-compliant InfiniBand switch for blade server systems.

Available today, the Voltaire 40 Gb/s InfiniBand Blade Switch Module delivers scalable, high performance and energy efficient connectivity for clustered blade solutions.

Dawning Information Industry Co., Asia’s supercomputing infrastructure supplier, demonstrates the Voltaire switch as part of its introduction of the world’s first blade computing system to fully comply with SSI standards. The demonstration will take place at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2009, Sept. 22-24, at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Industry-wide standards for blade computing systems are largely driven by the SSI Forum, a server industry group chartered with the development of server infrastructure standards that address customer and ecosystem challenges. The Voltaire 40 Gb/s InfiniBand Blade Switch Module is the industry’s first InfiniBand blade switch to comply with SSI specifications and ensure interoperability across industry-standard blade computing systems, including Dawning’s new TC3600 Blade System.

“The Dawning TC3600 Blade System with Voltaire InfiniBand provides an efficient infrastructure solution to generate maximum performance for mission-critical applications while also reducing costs, space and power requirements,” said Nie Hua, vice president of Dawning. “We’re pleased to lead the industry with the world’s first SSI-compliant blade computing system giving our customers the added assurance that their systems are based on industry-wide standards and have proven interoperability.”

The Voltaire 40 Gb/s InfiniBand Blade Switch Module is based on Voltaire’s field-proven design and features fourteen 40 Gb/s internal ports for server connectivity and sixteen external QSFP ports for fabric connectivity. Combined with port to port latency of less than 100 nanoseconds, this provides a congestion-free solution that exceeds the bandwidth and latency requirements of even the most intensive applications. Moreover, the switch consumes only 4 watts of power per port making it an energy efficient solution for today’s data centers.

“The SSI Forum is helping to drive the rapid adoption of blade servers and I am pleased to see the collaboration between Dawning and Voltaire to bring solutions to market that take advantage of these well-defined standards,” said Jim Ryan, SSI Forum president and initiative manager, Intel.

“The Voltaire 40 Gb/s InfiniBand Blade Switch Module delivers high performance and low latency to meet the scalability and energy efficiency requirements of scale-out data centers that are turning to blade computing systems for their IT infrastructure,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. “We’re extremely pleased to be the first to offer an SSI-compliant InfiniBand blade switch that’s interoperable with the SSI standards-based blade solutions from our large global network of partners.”

Availability
The Voltaire 40 Gb/s InfiniBand Blade Switch Module is available today through select Voltaire OEM partners and resellers.