STORAGE

Voltaire, a leading provider of high performance InfiniBand solutions and StoreAge Networking Technologies, an innovator in enterprise SAN storage management and data protection applications, today announced a combined solution that leverages the high performance capabilities of InfiniBand to enable flexible, scalable SAN storage management, virtualization and data protection. The solution will be particularly useful to customers in the high performance computing, telecommunications, video and broadcast, and financial services industries that require high performance storage area networking. The joint solution integrates StoreAge Virtualization Manager software with Voltaire’s InfiniBand-based switching solutions that use the iSCSI RDMA protocol to connect InfiniBand clusters to Fibre Channel (FC) storage and IP SANs. By leveraging iSCSI RDMA over 4X (10 Gbps) InfiniBand, Voltaire’s solution offers unmatched performance for storage and enables customers to connect hundreds of nodes with access to multiple FC storage devices and remote iSCSI storage. With the added benefit of StoreAge provisioning and data protection applications hosted on InfiniBand switching solutions, customers now can centrally manage heterogeneous storage subsystems with a common software suite that includes SAN-based volume management, snapshot, replication and mirroring. A key benefit this integration offers is the transparent storage provisioning and protection for servers at the InfiniBand switch router level, thereby eliminating the need to install any special software or agents on any servers in the cluster. This is critical for customers who are integrating storage into grid or on demand computing environments. “As the demand for InfiniBand solutions continues to grow, it is clear that integration with storage is a necessity,” said David Hill, vice president of storage research at the Aberdeen Group. “This integration of virtualization and data protection on InfiniBand gives customers a scalable, flexible solution for high performance storage.” “The solution from StoreAge and Voltaire will be attractive to customers seeking to improve the performance, manageability and data protection of large clusters and grids,” said Arun Jain, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. “With the I/O virtualization capabilities embedded into our solution, HPC and data center customers can now have the ultimate flexibility and performance connecting their clusters and grids to heterogeneous storage arrays.” The two companies will demonstrate their combined solution at Storage Networking World in Phoenix, Arizona April 5-8, 2004 and at ClusterWorld Conference and Expo in San Jose, California, April 5-8, 2004, in the Voltaire booth 218. The Voltaire-StoreAge platform will run volume management, snapshot and mirroring capabilities across multiple cluster nodes. “We are pleased to be working with Voltaire to bring this unique solution to the market,” said Mark Spowart, president of StoreAge Networking Technologies. “By porting the industry-proven StoreAge SAN management and data protection applications to the Voltaire solution, we are able to offer support for InfiniBand environments. The growing InfiniBand market is asking for enterprise class storage management solutions. We are addressing that specific need.”