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

'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", stated Alex Yost, vice president, IBM BladeCenter. "The addition of Voltaire-designed, 40 Gb/s, 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 centre 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 centres and HPC centres while also delivering the best price performance and energy efficiency of any high-performance interconnect", stated Ronnie Kenneth, chairman and CEO, Voltaire. "IT organisations 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/s InfiniBand switch."

The solution is expected to be available through IBM in 1H 2009.