Two New Voltaire Software

Voltaire Ltd. announced two new software products that deliver performance and management capabilities to scale-out 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabrics.

“Voltaire’s unique approach to data center networking includes intelligent management and application acceleration software offerings that work in combination with the switched infrastructure to enable extremely high-performance, dynamic data centers,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. “The new software we’re introducing today is optimized for Voltaire’s Vantage 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches and also enhances the performance of many third-party 10GbE switching platforms.”

Voltaire Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) software is the industry’s first and only Ethernet scale-out fabric management application. It orchestrates physical and virtual switches delivering guaranteed levels of service per application. By using an innovative application-centric, real-time approach, UFM enables data center operators to efficiently monitor and manage the entire fabric, maximize fabric resource utilization and enforce security and isolation policies. The software can identify network congestions and take corrective action before any potential performance degradation occurs ensuring the guaranteed levels of service.

“Datacenter network architectures are at an inflection point,” said Cindy Borovick, research vice president, IDC. “As organizations build dynamic, on-demand datacenters the network needs the ability to manage application service levels in such a way that ensures each application is allocated and consumes bandwidth based on business rules. To achieve a business-ready network, applications must be assured quality of service and be protected from network congestion. Solutions like Voltaire’s UFM provide virtual machine awareness on the network.”

UFM’s revolutionary fabric model allows users to manage fabrics as a set of business-related entities such as time-critical applications or services. UFM’s management infrastructure enables fabric monitoring and performance optimization on the application-logical level rather than just at the individual port or device level providing:

• Automatic provisioning of virtual and physical fabric resources in dynamic data centers and cloud environments,
• End to end enforcement of security and isolation on the fabric across virtual and physical elements,
• A unique engine that translates business requirements to data center fabric policies, in real time, according to application needs, and
• Correlation of monitored data to application/service level enabling quick and effective fabric analysis.

Introducing VMA Software for Ethernet
Voltaire also introduced Voltaire Messaging Accelerator (VMA) software for Ethernet fabrics. VMA software provides seamless Ethernet IP multicast connectivity, with transport latency (RTT/2) as low as 3.5 microseconds and application-to-application latency as low as 7 microseconds.

VMA boosts performance of high frequency trading applications, including NYSE Technologies’ Data Fabric, 29West LBM, RTI DDS and others developed in-house, cutting latency by as much as 80% and increasing application throughput per server, as compared to applications running on traditional Ethernet interconnect networks. VMA software runs on Voltaire Vantage switches and other industry-standard 10 GbE Ethernet networks and requires no changes to the application.

In a recent benchmark conducted by Voltaire and 29West, it was measured that application-to-application latency was consistently less than 10 microseconds under a broad range of message sizes and message rates that are typical to high-frequency trading environments. By comparison, the latency of alternative 10 GbE offload solutions is 2X slower.

“Financial services clients that need to improve performance for high-transaction trading applications require optimized 10 GbE fabrics that minimize network delays to deliver a better customer experience,” said Lee Fisher, manager of FSI business development, Scalable Computing and Infrastructure organization, HP. “HP ProLiant servers and ProCurve edge switches coupled with Voltaire Messaging Accelerator software help these firms accelerate their mission-critical trading applications and gain a competitive advantage.”

Voltaire also offers VMA software for 20-40 Gb/s InfiniBand fabrics, which continues to deliver the lowest latencies – as much as 30% lower than Ethernet-based solutions. The availability of VMA software on Ethernet means that customers now have a choice of data center fabrics that deliver low latency for their high performance messaging systems.

Voltaire will demonstrate UFM and VMA software along with Voltaire Vantage 10 GbE switches at Interop, April 27-29, 2010 in Las Vegas.

UFM is available at the end of Q2 2010 and VMA software is available today.