Companies cross-certify solutions for high-performance storage

DRESDEN, Germany, June 17 -- Voltaire Ltd., a leading provider of grid backbone solutions for datacenters, today announced that it is working with DataDirect Networks, Inc., the data infrastructure provider for the most extreme, content-intensive environments in the world, to deliver native InfiniBand storage to customers worldwide. The companies recently completed cross-certification testing of Voltaire Grid Director InfiniBand-based switches and software with DataDirect Networks S2A9900 StorageScaler systems. Used together, the products deliver up to a 200 percent improvement in storage performance compared to solutions that use Fibre Channel.

According to leading industry analyst firm The Taneja Group, the growth of the native InfiniBand storage market may be similar to the fastest growing storage systems with a potential CAGR of 60-70 percent.(1)

"With the growth of scale-out, cluster computing architectures, we're seeing increased demand for high-performance storage access," said Dave Fellinger, chief technology officer, DataDirect Networks. "We specifically designed the S2A9900 to further enable InfiniBand clusters, which our customers are increasingly choosing as a highly scalable and stable interface technology. InfiniBand enables remote direct memory access data distribution, allowing the realization of a true 'zero memory copy' storage interface and a very efficient protocol. Voltaire's InfiniBand switches are a great way for our users to gain exponential performance improvements at competitive prices."

The S2A9900 StorageScaler platform provides extreme performance and capacity, with the ability to manage 1.2PB of capacity, in only two floor tiles, and deliver sustained throughput of up to 6GB/s for both writes and reads, per appliance. It is the first storage system to support native 20Gbps InfiniBand DDR host connections, enabling users to achieve their bandwidth goals using significantly fewer network connections.

Voltaire Grid Director switches provide high-performance 20 Gbps InfiniBand connectivity and microsecond latencies to enable high-performance applications to run on distributed server, network and storage resources.

"Businesses in industries including digital media, oil and gas, and life sciences that rely on high performance storage to run their applications will gain big benefits from native InfiniBand storage," said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire. "We're pleased to work with our partner DataDirect Networks to bring these much-needed solutions to market."

Availability

Native InfiniBand storage solutions from Voltaire and DataDirect Networks are available today through Voltaire's OEM and reseller partners, and from DataDirect Networks and its partners.

About Voltaire

Voltaire (NASDAQ: VOLT) designs and develops server and storage switching and software solutions that enable high-performance grid computing within the datacenter. Voltaire refers to its server and storage switching and software solutions as the Voltaire Grid Backbone. Voltaire's products leverage InfiniBand technology and include director-class switches, multi-service switches, fixed-port configuration switches, Ethernet and Fibre Channel routers and standards-based driver and management software. Voltaire's solutions have been sold to a wide range of end customers including governmental, research and educational organizations, as well as enterprises in the manufacturing, oil and gas, entertainment, life sciences and financial services industries. Founded in 1997, Voltaire Ltd. is headquartered in Herzeliya, Israel, and has its U.S. headquarters in Billerica, Mass. More information about Voltaire is available at www.voltaire.com or by calling 1-800-865-8247.

About DataDirect Networks

DataDirect Networks is the leading provider of scalable storage systems for performance and capacity-driven applications. DataDirect Networks' S2A (Silicon Storage Architecture) technology enables modern applications such as video streaming, content delivery, modeling and simulation, backup and archiving, cluster and supercomputing, and real-time collaborative workflows that are driving the explosive demand for storage performance and capacity. DataDirect Networks' S2A technology and solutions solve today's most challenging storage requirements, including providing shared, high-speed access to a common pool of data, minimizing datacenter footprints and storage costs for massive archives, reducing simulation computational times, and capturing and serving massive amounts of digital content. For more information visit DataDirect Networks at www.datadirectnet.com or call +1-800-TERABYTE (837-2298).

(1) The Taneja Group, InfiniBand in the Enterprise: Next Generation Data Center Computing, April 2008.

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Source: Voltaire Ltd.