Voltaire Announces Layer-2 10GbE Switch

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voltaireVoltaire has announced their latest addition to their line of switch products.  The Vantage 8500 is a Layer-2 10 gigabit ethernet switch designed for enterprise data centers and cloud computing environments.  Put the brakes on man.  Doesn’t Voltaire make Infiniband gear?  Indeed they do, and now add 10GbE to the mix.  According to Voltaire, the Vantage 8500 is the world’s largest, non-blocking 10GbE switching platform.  Each 8500 features up to 288 wire-speed 10GbE ports in a 15U chassis.  With the addition of Voltaire’s stacking technology, one can build non-blocking 10GbE fabrics that extend upwards of 3,400 ports.

Virtualization breaks the old network architecture and creates a need for a new approach to data center networking,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. “With virtualization, a three-tiered architecture with oversubscription no longer works – customers need a solution with a non-blocking core that can scale linearly. The Voltaire Vantage 8500 will be available this year to address the virtualization, scalability, low latency, low power and low cost requirements of scale-out data center customers.”

This could prove to be very interesting for the HPC industry.  10GbE has always been an “easily adoptable” technology, but few customers are willing to swallow the costs for a large-scale deployment.  As compared to Infiniband, 10GbE switches have been prohibitively expensive until recently.  For more info on the new Voltaire technology, read the full release here.