Voltaire Outlines Converged Network Strategy

Cisco and Brocade aren’t the only networking equipment companies targeting the converged data center network. Infiniband specialist Voltaire Ltd. (VOLT) yesterday introduced new switches supporting 10 Gigabit Ethernet using Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), the new standard for Ethernet with reduced packet loss. Infiniband is a high-speed networking technology used primarily in high-performance computing, supercomputers and Wall Street trading platforms. Voltaire sells InfiniBand switching platforms and software offering connectivity at 20 and 40 gigabits.

The introduction of CEE, which offers many of the features of Infiniband, will offer additional options for low-latency networking. Cisco has teamed with NYSE Technologies to offer customized networking solutions for financial services apps using 10 gigabit Ethernet.

Voltaire has now introduced a “scale-out” Ethernet architecture built around new Layer 2 core switches based on CEE standards, designed to deliver high performance and low latency over a virtualized data center fabric. Voltaire has outlined its new architecture in a presentation on its web site.

“We are approaching our new data center design with fresh thinking and innovative ways to maximize space and cost to deliver the lowest latency and best performance to our customers,” said Steve Rubinow, EVP and co-Chief Information Officer, NYSE Euronext. “Voltaire’s scale-out approach to Ethernet fabrics is unique and very well-aligned with the scalable infrastructure we will deploy in our next generation global data centers.”

“With the growth of consolidation, virtualization and cloud computing in the data center, the core of the data center network is currently undergoing an evolution of requirements with the development of new network technologies specifically for the data center,” said Mark Fabbi, vice president, Enterprise Networking, Gartner Research. “These new high-end data center requirements are opening the door for innovation, causing a new category of Layer 2 core switches to emerge enabling high-capacity, scale-out fabrics to support 1000s of servers that don’t require the expensive, multi-tiered architecture of days gone by.”

Voltaire’s products are included in cluster and blade server offerings from Bull, HP, IBM, NEC, Rackable, SGI, and Sun and provide the internal server-to-storage connectivity for the HP-Oracle Database Machine. Founded in 1997, Voltaire is headquartered in Ra’anana, Israel and Billerica, Massachusetts.

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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.