Voltaire's Green-Friendly Switches Support Data Center Supercomputers

In Green news, Voltaire says that it has been designing and developing server and storage switching and software solutions that enable high-performance grid computing within the data center.

 

Recent reports indicate that the company’s switching technology connects the seven most energy-efficient supercomputers listed in the so-called “Green500 List” from Green500.org.

 

Energy use and cost will become the single-most-critical capacity constraint in large data centers by 2010, according to Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner (News - Alert) 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 data centers’ infrastructure,” Kumar said.

 

Voltaire has been focusing in improving data center efficiency by enabling grid computing deployments on commodity server and storage offerings. The company’s product portfolio includes host communications adapters, multi-service switches, integrated Gigabit Ethernet and Fiber Channel routers with network virtualization software that delivers good performance and efficient backbone for grid computing architectures.

 

The Voltaire Grid Director family of switches enables high performance applications to run on distributed server, storage and network resources. According to the company, multiple Grid Director Switches can be interconnected to form very large high performance clusters and grids.

 

The seven supercomputers on the list that are supported by Voltaire’s switching technology are of IBM (News - Alert) 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 number seven position on the list for energy performance.

 

These switches deliver up to 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, said the company.

 

Voltaire’s clear leadership position on the Green500 list highlights the unique combination of performance and low power consumption that our switches deliver, according to Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire.

 

“As companies with large data centers 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,” Somekh said.