Voltaire and IBM Expand OEM Partnership

Voltaire Ltd. announced that Voltaire and IBM Corp. are expanding their strategic partnership whereby IBM is now selling Voltaire’s new 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches with IBM’s integrated System Cluster 1350 portfolio of products.

The addition of Voltaire’s scale-out Ethernet switches to IBM’s data center networking portfolio provides customers who are designing next generation, virtualized data centers and cloud environments, a complete solution that delivers efficiency, scalability and performance, at significantly reduced costs.

“Our inclusion of Voltaire’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches in our Dynamic Infrastructure portfolio for System x is part of IBM’s ongoing strategy to give our customers more flexibility and choice of innovative networking solutions to address the growing demands on their IT environments,” said Alex Yost, vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group. “Expanding our partnership with Voltaire into Ethernet networking will help support IBM’s data center networking initiatives with a solution that offers customers the performance, efficiency and scalability they need to get the utmost value out of their scale-out and virtualized environments.”

Available today, the Voltaire Vantage 8500 switch is a 10 Gigabit Ethernet, high-density Layer 2 core switch that addresses the key networking requirements of virtualized, scale-out data centers. The Vantage 8500 features less than 1 microsecond latency, low 10 watts per port power consumption at low per port costs delivering unmatched scalability with the lowest solution cost, power consumption, and latency on the market. The switch has a unique capability to enable simplified, flat, scale-out fabrics. By clustering up to twelve Vantage 8500 switches together, a customer can expand their data center to many thousands of servers while preserving the same efficiency and price-per-port, without degrading the performance or latency like traditional hierarchical network designs.

“IBM’s decision to offer Voltaire’s new Ethernet switches is a testament to the unique value these products bring to scale-out, virtualized data centers,” said Ronnie Kenneth, CEO and Chairman, Voltaire. “We are very pleased to continue to grow our partnership with IBM to include Voltaire Ethernet alongside our market leading InfiniBand switching platforms.”

Expanded Partnership
IBM has offered Voltaire InfiniBand switches and software as part of its HPC and data center portfolios since 2004. Together, IBM and Voltaire solutions are driving the high-performance data centers of some of the world’s largest companies, as well as the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Roadrunner, at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

In June 2009, IBM added Voltaire’s 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switch module for IBM BladeCenter to its HPC and enterprise solutions portfolio. Custom designed by Voltaire for IBM, the switch accelerates performance of applications running on BladeCenter.

This announcement marks the expansion of the partnership to include Voltaire’s Ethernet-based switches, in addition to Voltaire’s 20 and 40 Gb/s InfiniBand platforms in the IBM System Cluster 1350 integrated portfolio.

Beginning today, IBM is also offering Voltaire’s recently introduced Grid Director 4700, a 40 Gb/s QDR InfiniBand director switch. The switch features 324 ports of 40 Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity, with the option to double capacity to 648 ports using Voltaire’s HyperScale fabric boards. Its unique stackable architecture enables customers to build larger configurations into the hundreds and thousands of nodes, with lower latency and greater simplicity than alternative solutions.