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Voltaire Announces General Availability of Vantage 8500 Ethernet Switch for Scale-Out, Virtualized Data Centers and Clouds

Voltaire Ltd., a leading provider of scale-out data center fabrics, today announced the general availability of the Vantage™ 8500 switch, a high-performance, high-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch for scale-out data centers and cloud computing.

The Voltaire Vantage 8500 is a Layer 2 core switch that addresses the key networking requirements of virtualized, scale-out data centers including efficiency, scalability, and performance, at significantly lower costs. It also enables consolidation of network tiers to reduce infrastructure expenses even further. The Vantage 8500 features less than 1 microsecond latency, low 10 watts per port power consumption at low per port costs delivering unmatched scalability with the lowest solution cost, power consumption, and latency on the market.

For a customer building a 1000 node data center fabric with Voltaire Vantage 8500 switches, this delivers 10X lower latency and 4X faster core performance for half the price, using 3X less power than alternative solutions.

“The performance, efficiency and low cost requirements of large-scale data centers is driving the need for new network architectures that offer improved I/O bandwidth without adding extra tiers and oversubscription to the network,” said Joe Skorupa, Research VP, Gartner. “State of the art, two-tier data center networks must scale from hundreds to a few thousand core ports, driving the requirement for high capacity, non-blocking 10 Gigabit Ethernet core switches.”

The Voltaire Vantage 8500 has a unique capability to enable simplified, flat, scale-out fabrics. By clustering up to twelve Vantage 8500 switches together, a customer can expand their data center to many thousands of servers while preserving the same efficiency and price-per-port, without degrading the performance or latency like traditional hierarchical network designs.

“The ability to deliver predictable, consistent 10 Gb/s throughput is important for the new virtualized data center. These data centers are running at high utilization rates serving many applications and cannot afford disruptions in service,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. “Our new Vantage 8500 is a high capacity, Layer 2 core switch that enables a simplified, ‘flat’ data center network that efficiently delivers reliable performance.”

“This switch puts an end to the era of the over-provisioned network,” Somekh added.

The Voltaire Vantage 8500 features 288 wire speed, 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a 15U high chassis making it the world’s largest non-blocking Ethernet data center switch. The Vantage 8500 is based on converged enhanced Ethernet (CEE) technology to provide InfiniBand-like capabilities to the data center such as a lossless switching fabric, multi-pathing, virtualization, fabric-wide congestion management and QoS. The switch supports industry standard servers such as those offered by HP and IBM, third-party switches, and leading management and virtualization solutions. It is interoperable with both 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet solutions for easy integration with existing data centers and mixed environments.

“Customers building new computing environments are leveraging scale-out and virtualized infrastructure to get higher performance for their demanding applications at a lower cost,” said Ed Turkel, manager, business development, Scalable Computing and Infrastructure, HP. “The Voltaire Vantage 8500 Layer 2 core switch, coupled with HP scale-out servers, storage, edge switches and middleware, delivers a technology infrastructure that dynamically executes complex user workloads in the most efficient way possible.”

The Vantage 8500 also features many software-based capabilities to address virtualized and converged data center environments. Voltaire’s Unified Fabric Manager™ (UFM) software, application acceleration software and management OS (VT-OS) provide powerful management and performance enhancement tools.

“Voltaire’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet platforms complement IBM’s enterprise cloud computing and virtualized data center solutions,” said Alex Yost, vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group. “Combining Voltaire Vantage 8500 switches and software with IBM BladeCenter, iDataPlex and rackmount servers enables efficient high-performance data centers that meet our customers’ stringent latency, power and cost requirements.”

Availability

The Voltaire Vantage 8500 is available today through selected OEM and reseller partners.

Additional product information is available at www.voltaire.com/Vantage_8500 and more information about Voltaire’s Ethernet ecosystem partners is available at www.voltaire.com/vantage_ecosystem.

More details on Voltaire’s Ethernet architecture are explained in a whitepaper entitled, “Scaling-Out Ethernet for the Data Center” available for download at www.voltaire.com/Ethernet.

Published Tuesday, October 20, 2009 6:24 PM by David Marshall
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