HP Adds Voltaire UFM to Cluster Portfolio

Hewlett-Packard is expanding the offerings in its Unified Cluster Portfolio by adding Voltaire's Unified Fabric Manager product to the lineup.

When used in conjunction with Voltaire's 20G-bps or 40G-bps InfiniBand switches, the UFM software can give IT administrators greater visibility into their scale-out data centers and improve manageability.

The software gives users a logical view of their high-performance infrastructure, including servers, applications and networking fabric.

The deal was announced Oct. 1.

Ed Turkel, manager of business development for HP's Scalable Computing and Infrastructure business, said the combination of HP's ProLiant systems and Voltaire's UFM software will help businesses eliminate the I/O bottlenecks in their scale-out data center infrastructures, enabling them to more efficiently run high-performance applications.

"Customers deploying scale-out environments to enable business growth need solutions that are capable of supporting the increased network complexities without impacting system performance," Turkel said in a statement.

HP and Voltaire pointed to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, which has selected Voltaire's 40G-bps InfiniBand switches and UFM software for an HP supercomputer being used in the Open Cirrus project, an open cloud computing research testbed.

The institute's supercomputer will include 334 ProLiant DL2x170h G6 and ProLiant DL4x170h G6 servers.

HP's G6 systems are powered by Intel's quad-core Xeon 5500 Series "Nehalem EP" processors and Advanced Micro Devices' six-core "Istanbul" Opterons, and are designed to offer higher performance and greater energy efficiency than previous ProLiant models.