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Voltaire saves glaciers with 20Gb/s Infiniband switch

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By Austin Modine in Mountain View • Get more from this author

Posted in PC Builder, 16th June 2007 00:38 GMT

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Infiniband specialist Voltaire is playing the green card to hawk its new 20Gb/s director-class switch for high-performance grid computing.

The vendor claims the efficient packet delivery and low error rates in the Voltaire Grid Director ISR 2012 makes it an economical alternative over 10Gb/s Ethernet.

Voltaire's Grid Director IRS 2012 comes in a 12-slot, 15U 19" rack mountable chassis. The system has up to 288 ports full of 20Gb/s goodness. The company claims utilizing InfiniBand provides the 2012 with application latencies as low as 1.2 microseconds and delivers the same or better results than 10gb/s Ethernet with fewer servers connected.

A higher density port equates to less power consumed than using smaller 10Gb/s Ethernet switches — which in turn means serious data crunchers can sleep easy knowing they murdered fewer penguins.

Voltaire's second generation 20gb/s switch has extended its reach over its predecessor. The Grid Director ISR 2012 supports copper InfiniBand cables up to 14m and optical InfiniBand cables up to 100m.

The company shares the 20gb/s Infiniband market with the likes of Cisco's SFS 7000 Series switches and Mellanox's InfiniScale III switch. ®

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