ACADEMIA

First InfiniBand Provider to Offer Enterprise-Class Support for OFED on Multivendor Hardware: Voltaire today announced a new customer support model whereby the company will provide support services to customers using Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) regardless of the brand of InfiniBand hardware used by the customer. Novell is the first customer to take advantage of the new offering. OFED, a necessary component for operating InfiniBand-based fabrics, is a packaged version of the OpenFabrics Alliance's open-source software. It supports server interconnect and storage connectivity using RDMA-based InfiniBand and iWARP fabrics in Linux environments. The OFED software is integrated into major versions of Linux distributions from Novell and Red Hat. Voltaire has been a lead developer for OpenFabrics since its inception and contributes updates to the software on a continuous basis. "Voltaire has provided top-tier global support services to our customers since the company was founded and we believe it's one of our core strengths," said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire. "This new support model allows us to provide full end-to-end support leveraging our expertise from the software to the switch hardware. Now, customers covered by a Voltaire support contract through our OEMs, resellers and partners can obtain Level 3 support for OFED regardless of whether they use InfiniBand switches from Voltaire or third party vendors." Introducing Availability of Voltaire-Supported OFED 1.3 Voltaire also announced today the immediate availability of support for OFED version 1.3. Voltaire now offers an easily installable OFED distribution along with the availability of additional fixes and patches that have been discovered during the Voltaire testing and certification process. In addition to OFED 1.3's new enterprise-grade features such as Quality of Service (QoS) management capabilities that enable unified LAN, IPC and SAN applications over the same wire and integration of the Reliable Datagram Service (RDS) protocol which enhances performance of Oracle 11g RAC, Voltaire has improved on the software's high availability bonding features furthering its usability for enterprise customers. Voltaire's enhancements to OFED are continually contributed back to the OpenFabrics developer community so they may be used in future versions of OFED, in order to enable interoperability of InfiniBand fabrics. Availability Support for OFED is available immediately. Resellers of InfiniBand solutions and end users can learn more about engaging Voltaire for OFED customer support by calling 1-800-865-8247. The installation package for OFED 1.3 is available today and can be downloaded by Voltaire customers at its Web site.