INDUSTRY

Extends and Automates Capabilities of Leading Grid Provisioning & Virtualization Solutions to Deliver Unprecedented Data Center Efficiency & Resource Utilization: Voltaire today announced a first-of-its-kind software solution for the management and automation of dynamic grid computing environments in the data center. The software enables true automation of repetitive IT tasks associated with network, server and storage provisioning to deliver unprecedented efficiency. Provisioning tasks that used to take days and involve multiple groups within IT can now be reduced to seconds. “GridVision Enterprise is the missing link for the provisioning and management of scalable, dynamic grids,” said Patrick Guay, senior vice president of marketing, Voltaire. “Together with Voltaire’s rack interconnect solutions supporting InfiniBand, Ethernet and Fibre Channel, Voltaire is delivering a best-in-class solution that provides enterprise customers with a new ‘efficiency edge’.” GridVision Enterprise leverages advanced I/O and network virtualization technology embedded in Voltaire’s multi-service switches. GridVision automatically maps the relationships between application requirements and the physical or virtual data center environment consisting of servers, storage and networks to create a logical and highly efficient data center. Employing an innovative abstracted object model, an intuitive graphical user interface and an open web services API, GridVision Enterprise integrates with leading server and storage virtualization solutions, as well as provisioning and scheduling tools, creating a single, logical data center environment consisting of both physical and virtual resources. This visionary approach to data center management dramatically improves the efficiency of resources while reducing operating costs. The once disparate data center islands of servers, networks and storage can now be unified to truly automate the provisioning and effective management of resources. In today’s Fortune 500 data centers, a day-to-day project such as deploying a new application requires numerous manual tasks and “handshakes” between the infrastructure, server, storage and networking groups. New virtualization technologies can add even more complexity to the mapping of physical and virtual resources. End-to-end resource provisioning can take days or weeks depending on the size of the environment or workloads of the individual groups. GridVision Enterprise unifies the data center operating environment and allows operators to “instantaneously” complete these tasks. GridVision Enterprise is initially designed for use in grid fabrics that leverage Voltaire Grid Director multi-service switches as the high performance interconnect. Voltaire Grid Director switches feature integrated InfiniBand, Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel, and deliver up to 60 Gigabits per second performance and latencies below ½ microsecond. Voltaire solutions are deployed in many of the world’s largest data centers in industries including financial services, manufacturing, government and media/entertainment. Voltaire is working with partners such as AMD, FalconStor Software, IBM, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Novell, Platform Computing, United Devices, VMware and XenSource to integrate GridVision Enterprise with their grid computing and virtualization solutions. “IBM shares in Voltaire’s open and standards-based approach to grid computing and in their vision for a more automated data center,” said Tamara Crawford, Program Director, IBM Grid Ecosystem Strategy. “As part of IBM's Grid and Grow ecosystem offerings, GridVision Enterprise provides businesses with a way to optimize their existing infrastructures in a grid environment that can expand to larger, more dynamic implementations as their needs grow.” “As the vision of an Enterprise Grid evolves and encompasses compute resource virtualization, network virtualization and storage virtualization, Platform will continue to work with our eco-system of partners to deliver this value to our customers and to the market,” said Simon Lonsdale, Director of Strategic Alliances, Platform Computing. “Platform LSF and Platform Enterprise Grid Orchestrator (EGO) will integrate with Voltaire’s GridVision Enterprise software, providing network-aware scheduling and resource optimization to our Enterprise Data Center customers.”