Voltaire has expanded its strategic partnership with IBM, whereby IBM is now selling Voltaire’s new 10 gigabit ethernet switches with its integrated System Cluster 1350 portfolio of products.
The company said that the addition of Voltaire’s scale-out ethernet switches to IBM’s data center networking portfolio provides customers who are designing virtualised data centers and cloud environments a complete offering that delivers scalability and performance, at reduced costs.
The Voltaire Vantage 8500 switch is a 10 gigabit ethernet, layer 2 core switch that addresses the networking requirements of virtualised, scale-out data centres. The company claims that Vantage 8500 features less than 1 microsecond latency, low 10 watts per port power consumption at low per port costs.
According to the company, by clustering up to 12 Vantage 8500 switches together, a customer can expand their data centre to many thousands of servers while preserving the same efficiency and price-per-port, without degrading the performance or latency like hierarchical network designs.
This partnership includes Voltaire’s ethernet-based switches, in addition to Voltaire’s 20 and 40 Gb/s InfiniBand platforms in the IBM System Cluster 1350 integrated portfolio. IBM is also offering Voltaire’s recently introduced Grid Director 4700, a 40 Gb/s QDR InfiniBand director switch.
Alex Yost, vice president of IBM Systems & Technology Group, said: “Our inclusion of Voltaire’s 10 gigabit ethernet switches in our Dynamic Infrastructure portfolio for System x is part of IBM’s ongoing strategy to give our customers more flexibility and choice of innovative networking solutions to address the growing demands on their IT environments.
“Expanding our partnership with Voltaire into ethernet networking will help support IBM’s data centre networking initiatives with a solution that offers customers the performance, efficiency and scalability they need to get the utmost value out of their scale-out and virtualised environments.”
