Voltaire, Panasas Team on Fabrics

AUSTIN, Texas -- Voltaire Ltd. (NASDAQ: VOLT), a leading provider of grid backbone solutions for data centers, today announced that it is working with Panasas, the global leader in parallel storage solutions, to deliver high-performance storage solutions based on unified fabrics to customers worldwide. The companies recently completed cross-certification testing of Voltaire Grid Director(TM) switches and InfiniBand-to-10-Gigabit-Ethernet gateways with the Panasas ActiveStor 6000 Parallel Storage Cluster. Used together, the products can deliver full-rated throughput using an efficient unified fabric configuration that reduces overall system costs.

The Voltaire-Panasas solution enables very high performance storage access for large, scale-out cluster computing architectures using Voltaire 20 Gb/s InfiniBand switches for the server interconnect and Voltaire InfiniBand-to-10-Gigabit-Ethernet gateways to provide connectivity to the Panasas storage. The solution removes the bottlenecks typically associated with clustered storage and reduces costs because only one InfiniBand adapter is used in each server, eliminating the need to install costly 10 GbE network interface cards on all of the servers or to implement complicated "work-arounds" using servers as I/O gateways.

"Working with Voltaire, we've developed a really elegant storage solution for large-scale clustered environments that we've already begun deploying at customer sites," said Don Grabski, director of product management, Panasas. "During our certification process, we tested the solution on a 32-node cluster and achieved very good performance results that will make a difference for application performance in real-world HPC environments. The four Panasas AS6000 module configuration with the Voltaire Grid Director switches and InfiniBand-to-10-Gigabit-Ethernet gateways are capable of read performance in excess of 2GB/second."

Voltaire Inc.