Voltaire unleashes 40Gbps data center switch

Voltaire this week announced a 40Gbps InfiniBand switch switch for data centers that's designed to provide a low latency fabric for large, high-performance clusters.

The Grid Director 4700 features 324 ports of 40Gbps InfiniBand connectivity, with the option to double capacity to 648 ports using double-density fabric boards. The double-density fabric boards are the basis for the company's HyperScale architecture, a stackable strategy for building larger configurations into the hundreds and thousands of nodes.

The 19U high Grid Director 4700 has less than 300 nanosecond port-to-port latency to accelerate performance of applications running on server and storage scale-out fabrics, Voltaire says. The switch consumes 6.5-watts-per-port, the company says.

Voltaire also introduced a management application designed to optimize performance of large server and storage scale-out fabrics. Its Unified Fabric Manager software is designed to improve latency by as much as 10X in environments that run multiple applications and traffic types.

The software monitors, analyzes and optimizes fabric performance to improve the efficiency and utilization of large InfiniBand fabrics, Voltaire says. It monitors and analyzes fabric bottlenecks and errors, and matches fabric resource allocation and configurations to specific application requirements.

HP's multi-core Cluster Platforms are among those compatible with Voltaire's new Grid Director 4700 switch and Unified Fabric Manager software, Voltaire says.

The Grid Director 4700 and Unified Fabric Manager software will be available in the second quarter.