Voltaire Ltd., a provider of scale-out data center fabrics, announced the general availability of the Grid Director 4700, a 40 Gb/s InfiniBand director switch, which offers low latency rates. Combined with Voltaire's Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) software, released in conjunction with Grid Director, the solution provides faster performance and scalability for large, high-performance scale-out data centers, the vendor says.
UFM software is designed to optimize the performance of large server and storage scale-out fabrics. UFM software is designed to reduce manual administration by providing IT managers with a logical view of their infrastructure. This bridges the traditional gap between servers, applications and fabric elements, Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing for Voltaire, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "UFM provides added performance gains and fabric optimization for large, multi-tenant data centers that may be operating hundreds or even thousands of nodes," he explains. "We have customers who've deployed UFM in large, complex environments with multiple applications running simultaneously improve their application latency by 100%."
Somekh adds that "UFM also simplifies the management and operation of smaller, virtualized data centers. Unlike other management solutions, UFM can take a fabric-wide view of the data center to bridge the gap between servers, applications and fabric elements. This model allows users to manage fabrics as a set of business related entities such as time critical applications or services."
Voltaire Grid Director features 324 ports of 40 Gb/s 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 HyperScale architecture, a stackable architecture for building larger configurations into the hundreds and thousands of nodes, with lower latency and greater simplicity than alternative solutions.
Voltaire says that by employing Grid Director switches with HyperScale architecture, a customer can build a 1,296 node supercomputer with a fabric that delivers 20% lower latency than alternative solutions, while consuming 50% fewer switch ports, 40% fewer cables and 33% less power and rack-space.
The Grid Director 4700 switch and UFM software are available today and can be ordered through OEM partners and resellers. More information about the Grid Director 4700 is available here and instructions on how to register for a free 30-day trial of Unified Fabric Manager software at is available here.