When combined with Voltaire's recently introduced 10 Gigabit Ethernet line board and 4 Gigabits/second Fibre Channel storage router, customers can introduce unified fabrics to their data centers that take advantage of the highest performance InfiniBand, Ethernet and storage available on the market today.

Unified fabrics provide seamless, high performance networking services between InfiniBand fabrics, Fibre Channel SANs and Ethernet LANs over a single high performance fabric with multiple virtual interfaces replacing actual physical adapters. Voltaire's Grid Director switches enable unified fabrics for the next generation data center by addressing all three types of networking traffic. Customers can now use a single switch and no longer need to invest in three separate network technologies with multiple network adapters to operate a data center fabric. The result is better application performance at lower costs.

"The Grid Director ISR 2004 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel routers are a comprehensive solution that truly delivers improved application performance and ease-of-use at lower costs," said Patrick Guay, senior vice president of marketing, Voltaire. "Unlike competitive offerings that are more suitable for departmental applications, the Voltaire Grid Director ISR 2004 is ideal for large enterprises as well as commercial HPC users that want to deploy unified fabrics."

The Grid Director ISR 2004 features up to 96 ports of full 20 Gbps InfiniBand connectivity and nanosecond latencies to enable high-performance applications to run on distributed server, network and storage resources. The switch provides reliable packet delivery with ultra low error rates that ensure jobs run to completion and eliminates performance-robbing packet drops, retransmissions and fabric downtime. The superior signal quality associated with this "DDR-by design" switch enables the use of longer cables and the power-efficient design offers lower power and cooling requirements as compared to 10 Gigabit Ethernet offerings.

"As the ‘sister switch' to Voltaire's widely-deployed Grid Director ISR 2012, a 288 port 20 Gigabits/second DDR InfiniBand switch, the Grid Director ISR 2004 delivers the same cutting-edge performance and reliability in a smaller form factor that lowers the entry point for unified fabric deployments," said Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "Customers that need high bandwidth and ultra low latency to accelerate performance of their applications are poised to benefit from this new system."