Cisco last week bolstered its InfiniBand switch portfolio with the announcement of two switches and a management software package.

The announcement follows Cisco's release in September of a computer networking and virtualization architecture it calls VFrame. The architecture combines a set of InfiniBand-based server fabric switches (SFS) with the VFrame virtualization software suite.

The Cisco SFS 7012 and Cisco SFS 7024 are 144- and 288-port InfiniBand switches that are dial-on-demand (DDR) capable. They are managed with Cisco's SFS Subnet Management Software and wired with Cisco Superflex InfiniBand copper cables. They give the customer the ability to run InfiniBand over WANs and build bigger, more manageable server clusters.

Cisco claims its InfiniBand switches are used in some of the largest InfiniBand clusters, including Sandia National Laboratories' 4,500-node cluster and the cluster at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

The Cisco SFS 7012 and Cisco SFS 7024 switches use InfiniBand to connect servers together into grids of compute resources. They feature SFS advanced Ethernet and Fibre Channel gateway technology, letting them to connect to LAN or storage-area network resources.

The SFS Subnet Management software is designed for high-performance compute environments where cluster start-up and ongoing diagnostics are important. The Subnet Management software can manage more than 4,000 nodes and can bring up a cluster in less than one minute. High-availability database synchronization is available.

Cisco uses either its commercial driver stack or the OpenIB driver stack in high-performance computing environments.

Cisco acquired its InfiniBand technology in April when it bought TopSpin Communications for approximately $250 million cash.

The switches will be available at year-end starting at $1,000 per port.