APPLICATIONS

Voltaire, the leader in interconnect solutions for high performance grid computing, introduced today a new InfiniBand switching solution designed to deliver superior performance to mid-sized clusters and grids. The Voltaire ISR 9096 features 96 InfiniBand ports of 10 Gbps (4X) or 32 ports of 30 Gbps (12X) full bisectional bandwidth in a modular chassis enabling high performance clusters and grids. This is the industry's only 96 port InfiniBand switch that offers integrated GbE and Fibre Channel ports for network and storage virtualization for high performance clusters, grids and utility computing. The Voltaire ISR 9096 leverages the same design and interchangeable components as the highly acclaimed Voltaire ISR 9288, a 288 port InfiniBand switch launched earlier this year. The Voltaire ISR 9288 powers high performance clusters at many prestigious institutions worldwide including the Columbia supercomputer at NASA, and systems at Sandia National Laboratories and Shanghai University. "InfiniBand is rapidly overtaking proprietary technologies as the 'interconnect of choice' for high performance clustered computing and grids in the enterprise," said Arun Jain, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. "The addition of the ISR 9096 to the Voltaire switch product line means that Voltaire now can deliver the highest quality InfiniBand switching to medium-sized clusters leveraging the same technology as our highest port count switch. Clusters in the 64 to 128 node range will reap the greatest performance benefits from this solution." With this new InfiniBand solution, Voltaire is addressing key needs of high performance computing applications, clustered databases and enterprise grid solutions. In addition to high performance and low latency, the Voltaire ISR 9096 features multi-protocol connectivity in a single, flexible system. The switch chassis hosts Voltaire router blades that provide seamless connectivity between server clusters, Fibre Channel SANs, NAS appliances, IP SANs and TCP/IP networks (LANs). The router blades also enable the consolidation of fabrics and dynamic provisioning of resources using embedded high performance layer 4-7 capabilities such as TCP termination, partitioning, access control, traffic management and storage volume management. The switch comes fully loaded with VoltaireVision(tm) InfiniBand Fabric Management Software, an integrated management solution for the proactive monitoring and provisioning of fabric and attached I/O resources. "A 96 port InfiniBand switch is a critical building block for architecting high performance clusters with single and multi-tier network fabrics," said Matt Leininger, computational scientist at Sandia National Laboratories. "With InfiniBand and integrated I/O in a single switch, cluster design and management issues are greatly simplified." Delivering Enterprise-Class High Availability HPC clusters running mission-critical applications and enterprise grids have stringent high availability requirements. The Voltaire ISR 9096 addresses these needs with entirely hot-swappable and redundant components to allow for the highest availability. Power supplies, as well as fans, provide system high availability and serviceability, while redundant management blades maintain synchronization so that a failure can be recovered without the loss of management information or any disruption in port-to-port communication.