Voltaire Ltd., a leading provider of scale-out computing fabrics for data centers, has announced it will design a next generation high-performance 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switch module for IBM BladeCenter. The new IBM custom switch will deliver 100 percent faster InfiniBand connectivity to accelerate performance of applications running on BladeCenter.

According to Gartner Research, blade servers represent the fastest-growing server form factor on a worldwide basis.¹

"We recently built the world's fastest computer, and Voltaire was a big contributor. That's a great example of how IBM consistently provides our blade customers with the latest in networking technologies to allow them to extract maximum performance from their systems," said Alex Yost, vice president, IBM BladeCenter. "The addition of Voltaire-designed, 40 GB/sec, QDR InfiniBand switching to BladeCenter will provide an ideal platform for clients with high-performance needs."

The new switch module enables additional benefits for IBM BladeCenter in both the enterprise data center and high performance computing (HPC) markets. The combined solution will better support the performance requirements of enterprise applications for virtualization and enterprise resource planning and, because of the high bandwidth and I/O throughput, will greatly simplify large-scale HPC deployments. In addition to performance and scalability, Voltaire solutions contribute to the BladeCenter's energy efficiency by requiring very low power per port, making it a more energy efficient solution than bladed systems using 10 Gigabit Ethernet for the interconnect.

"Voltaire solutions are built to deliver the application acceleration and scalability demands of data centers and HPC centers while also delivering the best price performance and energy efficiency of any high-performance interconnect," said Ronnie Kenneth, chairman and CEO, Voltaire. "IT organizations with environments ranging from data warehousing and virtualization to industries including financial services, manufacturing, life sciences, government and education will achieve new levels of application performance with IBM BladeCenter and its new, 40 GB/sec InfiniBand switch."

The solution is expected to be available through IBM by the end of the first half of this year.

About Voltaire

Voltaire (NASDAQ: VOLT) is a leading provider of scale-out computing fabrics for data centers, high performance computing and cloud environments. Voltaire's family of server and storage fabric switches and advanced management software improve performance of mission-critical applications, increase efficiency and reduce costs through infrastructure consolidation and lower power consumption. Used by more than 30 percent of the Fortune 100 and other premier organizations across many industries, including many of the TOP500 supercomputers, Voltaire products are included in cluster and blade server offerings from HP, IBM, Rackable, SGI, and Sun and provide the internal server-to-storage connectivity for the HP-Oracle Database Machine. Founded in 1997, Voltaire is headquartered in Herzliya, Israel and Billerica, Massachusetts. More information is available at www.voltaire.com or by calling 1-800-865-8247.

¹Gartner Research Note: "Dataquest Insight: Blade Servers Continue Steady Proliferation," Jeffrey Hewitt, Oct. 28, 2008, ID Number: G00162493.