SYSTEMS

Voltaire, the worldwide leader in grid backbone solutions, today announced that Sun Microsystems can integrate Voltaire's complete family of switches, routers and host channel adapters into customer-defined solutions and configurations through the Sun Customer Ready Systems (CRS) program, enabling Sun to provide customers with factory-tested ready-to-deploy interconnect solutions for clustered computing. Voltaire solutions, which are based on the InfiniBand standard, are widely used in the data center to improve the performance of clustered, data-intensive applications, as well as engineering and modeling applications in the commercial HPC market space. Benchmark tests show that Voltaire solutions deliver 30% to as much as 120% performance improvement to computer-aided engineering applications when compared to Ethernet as the cluster interconnect. Voltaire multi-service switches offer integrated InfiniBand, GbE and Fibre Channel connectivity and are deployed successfully in some of the world's largest supercomputers and grids. The Sun CRS program enables businesses to order ready-to-deploy solutions that are built to their specifications, pre-integrated and tested in Sun's factories. Comprised of flexible configurations of Sun, Voltaire and other third-party hardware and software products, the program is designed to deliver systems that simplify and speed deployment of solutions, helping reduce total cost of ownership and improve the quality of customers' infrastructure. "Sun and Voltaire share a common commitment to deliver ultra high-performance cluster and grid solutions to our customers," said A.J. Mahajan, director, Customer Ready Systems, Sun Microsystems. "Customers can now turn to Sun's CRS program to get factory integrated clustered systems from a few to thousands of nodes that leverage InfiniBand performance and scalability." "The availability of Voltaire Grid Backbone solutions through Sun's CRS program means that customers can look to Sun to build custom systems that incorporate the industry's highest performance, low latency switching solutions," said Patrick Guay, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. "The combination of Sun and Voltaire solutions enables customers to gain high performance clusters and grids to operate their business critical-applications." Customers are already benefiting from the partnership. Japan's Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) selected Voltaire's InfiniBand-based Grid Backbone switching solutions as the high-performance interconnect for Japan's largest supercomputer, which will be used for computational scientific research. The Tokyo Tech system is expected to be one of the five largest supercomputers in the world as ranked by the Top500 and will be built using Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers with more than 10,000 AMD Opteron processor cores and ClearSpeed CSX600 SIMD processors, connected by multiple Voltaire Grid Director ISR 9288 switches. Voltaire Solutions Achieve Solaris-Ready Certification Voltaire also announced that its complete Grid Backbone switching product line - including its high port count director-class switches - have been certified on the Sun Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) on Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers and can proudly display the highly valued Solaris Ready logo. Displaying the Solaris Ready Logo assures customers of the proven interoperability between the Solaris 10 OS and Voltaire hardware and management software. Voltaire switch customers can now leverage the industry-leading features of the Solaris 10 OS, such as Predictive Self Healing, Solaris ZFS (zetabyte filesystem), Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) and Solaris Containers. Customers that wish to build large clusters and grids on the Solaris 10 OS on Sun Fire x64 servers can now take advantage of the Voltaire Grid Director ISR 9288 and ISR 9096 (288 and 96 port multi-service switches). These are the first high port density InfiniBand switches to be certified on the Solaris 10 OS. For more information about Voltaire's acceptance into the Sun Solaris Ready program, see its Web site.