StoneFly Selects Blade Networks’ 10GbE RackSwitch

BLADE Network Technologies, Inc. (BLADE) and StoneFly, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory, Inc., announced that StoneFly has selected BLADE’s RackSwitch as the fastest 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch for deployment with its new Voyager virtualized IP SAN solution. BLADE’s RackSwitch is part of BLADE’s Cloud Ready Network Architecture for the high bandwidth and low latency required in cloud computing and IP SAN environments.

             RackSwitch G8124

        
Voyager Virtualized IP SAN

StoneFly recently concluded an in-house test of its new Voyager IP SAN appliance using BLADE’s RackSwitch G8124 and alternative 10Gb Ethernet switches, which confirmed that the BLADE switch delivers the fastest iSCSI SAN performance of up to 950 megabytes per second. As the newest member of the StoneFly Storage Concentrator family of IP SANs, Voyager comes standard with Gigabit Ethernet connections, and is offered with optional quad 10GbE connections.

The Voyager-RackSwitch solution was shown for the first time at BLADE’s booth 1175 at Interop in Las Vegas.

"Our new Voyager appliance is our fastest SAN yet," said Bahman Jalali, Director of Product Management for StoneFly. With BLADE’s RackSwitch, it supports over 950 megabytes per second delivering by far the best performance of any 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch that we tested. "With more than 75 percent of our customers either considering or currently using server virtualization, the Voyager solution works flawlessly with BLADE’s RackSwitch to give them the speed and performance they require, plus high availability to ensure support of the most demanding applications and IT environments."

StoneFly’s Voyager with BLADE’s RackSwitch supports VMware vSphere to enable customers to harness the benefits of a scalable IP SAN in highly virtualized and cloud computing environments. RackSwitch and Voyager both support a wide range of virtual server environments including VMware, Citrix XenServer, Virtual Iron and Microsoft.

"StoneFly’s test demonstrates that BLADE’s RackSwitch delivers best-of-breed 10 Gigabit Ethernet performance required in today’s virtualized and cloud computing environments," said Dan Tuchler, VP of Product Management and Strategy, BLADE Network Technologies. "BLADE’s RackSwitch is ideal for service providers, financial institutions, web hosting companies and e-commerce sites and cloud computing environments where top storage performance is imperative."

Line-rate, non-blocking performance and low latency of less than 700 nanoseconds makes the RackSwitch G8124 ideal for high performance computing (HPC) clusters, cloud computing and I/O-intensive virtualized applications. BLADE’s new RackSwitch G8124 equipped with 24 SFP+ 10GbE ports rounds out BLADE’s low-power RackSwitch top-of-rack data center switch family. This includes the RackSwitch G8100, a low-latency 24-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet switched equipped with CX4 ports, and the RackSwitch G8000, a 1-10GbE aggregation switch equipped with 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports and up to four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports with either SFP+ or CX4 ports in a 1U footprint.

Price and Availability
StoneFly Voyager is available now, starting at $40,000, 16TBs of storage capacity, support for SATA, SAS, and SSD disks with 20 10GbE ports for SAN-connected servers.
BLADE’s RackSwitch G8124 with 24 SFP+ 10GbE ports is available now, with a list price of US$11,950 – under $500 per 10 Gigabit Ethernet port.