INDUSTRY

New Software Stack Features Performance, Scalability and Manageability for Large Clusters and Complements Upcoming Linux Distributions from Red Hat and SuSE that Support InfiniBand -- Voltaire, the worldwide leader in grid backbone solutions, today announced the availability of a new Voltaire InfiniBand Linux software stack based on OpenIB. This is the industry's first commercial software stack based on Open IB's current open source technology. OpenIB is a single, open-source Linux- and Windows-based software stack for deploying InfiniBand. With the availability of the open source software, businesses can be assured of InfiniBand's robustness across computing architectures and interoperability among manufacturers. For the past year and half, Voltaire has led the Department of Energy-funded OpenIB PathForward project and has been an important contributor to the success of OpenIB's inclusion in kernel.org and subsequent distributions. Voltaire has contributed software code and engineering resources and select Voltaire engineers serve as maintainers of the OpenIB code. In addition to being based on OpenIB, Voltaire GridStack offers additional features previously offered in Voltaire's own host software stack which has been used for years in clusters and grids that scale to thousands of nodes. GridStack includes protocols such as IPoIB, MPI, SDP, iSER (iSCSI RDMA Extension) and APIs to address the needs of the HPC, enterprise and storage industries. Moreover, GridStack has been tested with leading ISV applications such as LS-Dyna and FLUENT and is fully supported by Voltaire to ensure reliability and system continuity. A GridStack technology preview release is available today to enable advanced users to test and familiarize themselves with the OpenIB-based stack. The full release offering complete functionality will be available in Q2 2006 to coincide with and complement upcoming Linux distributions from Red Hat and SuSE that support InfiniBand. Future versions of GridStack will include support for RDS - a protocol that enables high performance Oracle 10g RAC solutions - once it is adopted by the OpenIB community. "We believe open source InfiniBand is critical to the widespread adoption of the technology for server, network and storage networking and virtualization in enterprise grid and high performance computing applications," said Asaf Somekh, director of marketing, Voltaire. "Now, independent software vendors can test and certify their applications on a single software stack that is available through the standard Linux distributions. This is one of the many ways that OpenIB expands the InfiniBand 'ecosystem'. "Early on, Voltaire put a stake in the ground to drive adoption of open source InfiniBand and we're very pleased to continue this leadership with the delivery of our OpenIB-based stack. We are fully committed to continuing our work with OpenIB," Somekh continued. GridStack is fully integrated with Voltaire's Grid Backbone product family, which includes multi-service, director-class switches that enable transparent, high performance connectivity between InfiniBand, Fibre Channel storage and iSCSI/TCP networks, as well as enable server and storage virtualization. Voltaire solutions are deployed successfully in some of the world's largest supercomputers and also serve as the backbone in enterprise grid environments in industries ranging from manufacturing to oil and gas exploration to financial services. "More and more businesses are adopting InfiniBand for their large cluster and grid computing environments because of the tremendous performance benefits the technology delivers to leading commercial applications used in a broad range of industries," said Bill Boas, vice chairman and founding member of the OpenIB Alliance. "Now that InfiniBand software is open sourced and included in standard Linux distributions, businesses have the added assurance that the technology is robust, widely-used and strongly supported by the industry." The GridStack technology preview release is available immediately to select customers and partners at its Web site.