CLOUD

Top-of-Rack Switch Delivers New Virtualization and Converged Data Center Capabilities

Voltaire has introduced the Voltaire Vantage 6048, a low-latency, high-performance Layer 2/3 top-of-rack switch optimized for cloud computing.

The switch features 48 ports of 10GbE line rate connectivity in a space-saving 1U device. It provides non-blocking switching throughput of 960 Gbps, low latency and the industry's lowest power consumption of 6.3 watts/port to deliver superior application performance as well as data center efficiency. The Vantage 6048 offers more CEE-compliant features than any other switch available in the industry, including Congestion Notification (IEEE 802.1Qau) to assure end to end congestion management and isolation between applications that co-exist in the data center.

The combination of the Voltaire Vantage 8500 Layer 2 core switches and new Vantage 6048 switches enables customers to build flat data center fabrics of more than 3,400 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports with non-blocking, lossless switch fabric capacity of 69.12 Terabits per second. Voltaire Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) software orchestrates the fabric as a single logical switch, enforcing fabric-wide service policies, providing real-time fabric flow level monitoring, and simplifying fabric administration across many physical and virtual switching elements.

In addition, using UFM software, data centers can orchestrate virtual machine (VM) connectivity persistency, assuring that the traffic flow for each VM is shaped, rate limited and policied throughout the entire fabric. UFM software enables VM connectivity mobility without any human intervention in the fabric networking configuration.

"Virtual layer 2 switching is key to the new consolidated data center network," said Lucinda Borovick, research vice president, Datacenter Networks, IDC. "The ability to combine high density at a compelling price point, coupled with a full set of data center bridging (DCB) capabilities positions the network for future requirements while enabling investment protection."

"Networking for the cloud requires a new class of scalability, performance and efficiency over a shared fabric with automated fabric management capabilities," said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. "Using the Vantage 6048 switch in combination with Voltaire UFM software, businesses relying on cloud architectures can attain a standard-based, modular infrastructure that can scale linearly from a single server rack to 100s of racks with the same hardware and software building blocks."

Voltaire will showcase the Vantage 6048 switch in booth 638 at VMworld, August 30-September 2, 2010, in San Francisco.

The Voltaire Vantage 6048 will be available in October 2010. More information is available at www.voltaire.com/6048.

More information about the Voltaire Vantage 8500 and UFM software is available at www.voltaire.com/Vantage _8500 and www.voltaire.com/UFM.