Voltaire Announces FDR IB Switch Development Plans

Voltaire Limited announced plans to deliver FDR (fourteen data rate) InfiniBand switching platforms that adhere to the InfiniBand Trade Association’s (IBTA) specifications for next generation InfiniBand. The new platforms will deliver an 80 percent increase in server-to-server throughput and improved scalability for faster application runtime. The switches will also have full compatibility with Voltaire’s portfolio of application acceleration and fabric orchestration software to enable greater fabric performance, scalability and management.

The Voltaire switches are expected to be available in the second half of 2011, aligned with the anticipated release of next generation server platforms and PCIe 3.0. Voltaire Grid Director switches provide high-performance InfiniBand connectivity and low latency to enable high-performance applications to run on distributed server, network and storage resources. Moreover, the switches’ power-efficient design offers low power and cooling requirements. They are used by customers worldwide in industries including financial services, manufacturing, energy, life sciences and HPC.

Voltaire switches accelerate more than half of the InfiniBand deployments on the new TOP500 list released this week – more than double the share of any other InfiniBand systems vendor.

"Voltaire is committed to the HPC market and we are aggressively developing solutions based on InfiniBand to continue to the lead the market in performance and scalability," said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. "FDR InfiniBand will address the needs of HPC customers who require the highest bandwidths and the utmost scalability to drive their applications."

"We expect this next generation of Voltaire switches to be the scale-out fabric of choice for future petascale and exascale clusters delivered through our key OEM partners," Somekh added.

"We continue to work closely with Voltaire to deliver next-generation platforms based on Mellanox’s industry-leading InfiniBand switching technology," said Marc Sultzbaugh, vice president of worldwide sales at Mellanox Technologies. "FDR InfiniBand-based solutions will address the market need for even higher application performance, delivering improved efficiency, scalability, and return on investment for the next wave of scale-out computing systems."

Voltaire offers software solutions for its InfiniBand platforms that further enhance application performance and management of scale-out environments. The company’s Fabric Collective Accelerator (FCA) software, Messaging Accelerator (VMA) software, Storage Accelerator (VSA) software and Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) software are currently available for Voltaire’s QDR InfiniBand fabrics. The company also intends to make these solutions available for their upcoming FDR InfiniBand platforms at first general availability.