INTERCONNECTS

Voltaire develops "50-50-300" pledge and efficiency calculator in response to findings: A recent survey by Voltaire found that, although CIOs and senior IT executives overwhelmingly believe that a green data center will become mission-critical, many lack the "green" to go green. Nearly 90 percent of executives surveyed said they believe that greening their data centers will be crucial to meeting their companies' business objectives in 2009, and 57 percent said they believe going green gives them a competitive advantage. Yet, 76 percent do not have a committed budget for a greening policy. The survey queried CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT executives who attended the 2008 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. In response to these findings, Voltaire developed a "50-50-300 Pledge," which states that IT executives, working with the company to deploy a Voltaire unified fabric, can save 50 percent on power/cooling related to server interconnections and 50 percent on hardware allocation/usage, while delivering up to a 300 percent increase in application performance. Voltaire has also developed an Efficiency Calculator to help IT executives estimate their network energy and cost savings and justify the investment. "It appears from these findings that senior IT management is still in the planning phases, and they will need to prioritize funding for these important greening initiatives," said Patrick Guay, Executive Vice President Global Sales and General Manager of Voltaire, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Voltaire Ltd. "We help them with the analysis and data collection in order to validate the savings they will achieve. Our numbers show that for enterprises, the return on a green data center fabric infrastructure using currently available technology is in the millions of dollars. For example, a Fortune 500 company with five data centers worldwide, and 3,000 servers per data center, can save approximately $7,400,000 per year." Xasax Corporation, which provides low latency financial market data to active trader and financial services organizations, is among companies that have deployed a Voltaire unified fabric to make their data center greener while producing faster performance. "Using a Voltaire unified fabric has increased system performance with five times the storage throughput compared to legacy implementations. Removing the communication bottlenecks has allowed us to use a highly-available VMware solution to facilitate the high-frequency communications on our North American financial market data network," said Noah Lieske, Founder and CEO of Xasax. "This produced a 50% reduction in power and cooling costs, while providing greater resiliency and much faster customer provisioning." Additional findings from the Voltaire survey include:

• Forty-three percent of respondents will implement a green data center in the next two years.
• Reducing power and cooling costs/requirements was ranked by 52 percent of the respondents as the most important benefit gained by going green in the data center. The next most important benefit was helping the environment (37 percent), followed by increased utilization (32 percent), reducing real estate/space requirements (28 percent), and reducing/consolidating equipment needed (27 percent).
• Among the respondents who said that going green gives their companies a competitive advantage, 72 percent clarified that it provides a more efficient and cost-effective infrastructure so they can invest more in new technologies.

Unified fabrics provide seamless, high performance networking services between InfiniBand fabrics, Fibre Channel SANs and Ethernet LANs over a single high performance fabric with multiple virtual interfaces replacing actual physical adapters. By addressing all three types of networking traffic within a single chassis, IT executives can reduce power consumption by consolidating and virtualizing their data center interconnects without sacrificing performance. "We want companies to understand the 'green' benefits of unified fabrics based on InfiniBand technology—the only fabric technology available today that improves data center efficiency and the performance of mission-critical applications at the same time—in industries from manufacturing to financial services to media/entertainment," said Mr. Guay. Data centers create massive amounts of data that is processed, routed, and archived. A key green requirement is to achieve those tasks while consuming less power and "real estate." Voltaire developed technology that achieves these requirements while improving application performance and reducing costs. Voltaire's unified fabric data center architecture, based on InfiniBand technology, allows companies in many industries to improve revenues through speedier application performance. Quicker ATM service and faster trading times are two examples where milliseconds can matter in terms of revenue potential.