Impact of Voltaire's technology demonstrates the high performance and power-efficiency capabilities of InfiniBand

BILLERICA, Mass., and HERZLIYA, Israel, Dec. 16 -- A new report announced last month found that Voltaire Ltd.'s switching technology is connecting the world's most energy-efficient supercomputers, according to the latest supercomputing "Green500 List" announced by the Green500.org. The top seven supercomputers on the list are all comprised of IBM BladeCenter servers and connected with Voltaire Grid Director InfiniBand switches, which deliver high performance coupled with low power consumption. Voltaire switches also provide the connectivity for the world's fastest petaflop supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which took the No. 7 position on the list for energy performance.

In addition, Voltaire delivered the high-performance interconnect for many other supercomputers on the list, used for a variety of applications such as astrophysics, energy, pharmaceutical and global climate research. Delivering 20 Gb/s InfiniBand performance – with 40 Gb/s solutions expected to be available later this month -- Voltaire director-class switches require on average only 5 watts of power per port, making them much more energy efficient than10 Gigabit Ethernet core switches that can consume between 18 and 100 watts of power per port.

"Energy use and cost will become the single-most-critical capacity constraint in large datacenters by 2010," said Rakesh Kumar, Research VP at Gartner Research. "As a result, users need to start measuring energy use and efficiency now to be able to use the data for forward planning across many different parts of their datacenters' infrastructure."(1)

A recent survey commissioned by Voltaire delivered similar findings about the importance of datacenter energy efficiency: nearly 90 percent of executives surveyed said they believe greening their datacenters will be crucial to meeting their companies' business objectives in 2009, and 57 percent said they believe going green gives them a competitive advantage. The survey queried CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT executives who attended the 2008 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.

"Voltaire's clear leadership position on the Green500 list highlights the unique combination of performance and low power consumption that our switches deliver," said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances at Voltaire. "As companies with large datacenters plan for their energy usage, we want them to understand that Voltaire offers interconnect technology available today that simultaneously improves application performance and energy efficiency."

The Green500 (www.green500.org) is a list ranking the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world and serves as a complementary view to the TOP500 (www.top500.org) list of the most powerful supercomputers.

More information about the power-efficiency of Voltaire's switching solutions, including downloadable whitepapers and a free datacenter efficiency calculator, is available at http://www.voltaire.com/unifiedfabric.

About Voltaire

Voltaire Ltd. (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 Herzliya, 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.

(1) For additional information, see Gartner Research Note: "Green Data Centers: The Six Key Attributes of Data Center Energy Efficiency Metrics," Rakesh Kumar, October 8, 2008, ID Number: G00161094.

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Source: Voltaire Ltd.