IBM adds Voltaire 10GbE switch to HPC lineup

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Speaking of reseller deals, this week IBM and Voltaire have announced that some of Voltaire’s latest gear will be shipping with an IBM SKU.

In June Voltaire announced its big new layer-2 10GbE switch, the Vantage 8500. This week the company announced that IBM will be reselling it in its HPC lineup via the System Cluster 1350 portfolio.

Voltaire logo“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,” said Alex Yost, vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group.  “Expanding our partnership with Voltaire into Ethernet networking will help support IBM’s data center 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 virtualized environments.”

According to Voltaire the 288-port, non-blocking, layer-2 switch offers “less and 1 microsecond” latency and consumes 10W per port. This announcement expands on the relationship that IBM and Voltaire already have around IB gear (Voltaire IB switches are inside the DOE’s RoadRunner system from Big Blue), and also adds a new IB switch with an HPC play

IBM logoBeginning today, IBM is also offering Voltaire’s recently introduced Grid Director 4700, a 40 Gb/s QDR InfiniBand director switch.  The switch features 324 ports of 40 Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity, with the option to double capacity to 648 ports using Voltaire’s HyperScale fabric boards.  Its unique stackable architecture enables customers to build larger configurations into the hundreds and thousands of nodes, with lower latency and greater simplicity than alternative solutions.