Mellanox and Voltaire are launching competing 40 Gb/s InifiniBand switches and management software at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany. Both Mellanox and Voltaire are pushing the scalability capabilities of their switches, as well as the fact that both play to the growing demand for more energy-efficient data center technologies. Mellanox is launching the IS5000 family of switches; Voltaire the Grid Director 4700.Mellanox Technologies and Voltaire are using the International
Supercomputing Conference to announce the releases of their latest
InfiniBand switches and management software.
The competing InfiniBand vendors are both announcing June 22 the
general availability of switches with up to 648 ports and management
offerings designed to make it easier for IT administrators to implement
and manage their InfiniBand environments.
Mellanox is rolling out its IS5000 40 gigabits-per-second InfiniBand
family of switch systems and its FabricIT management suite, which let
IT managers in both HPC (high-performance computing) environments and
data centers to scale using switch blocks from 36 to 648 ports per
enclosure.
The switches can come in several different chassis sizes to better
fit the users need, Bill Lee, senior product marketing manager, said
in an interview.
The Mellanox switches come with features aimed at making it easier
for users to scale their environments, including adaptive routing
capabilities, end-to-end congestion management and subnet partitioning.
In addition, the IS5000 switches offer integrated connectivity to
Ethernet LANs and Fibre Channel SANs (storage-area networks). Across
648 ports, the IS5000 switches provide between 2.9 terabits per second
to 51.8 Tb/s of bandwidth.
The management software touches on everything from the chassis to the fabric, and can also manage unified I/O environments.
The switches also fit into the growing demand for greater energy
efficiency, including low power per port and power management
capabilities. In addition, I/O bandwidth has a great deal of effect on
CPU efficiencies, Lee said. At 40 Gb/s, the CPU runs at 92 percent
efficiency, he said.
FabricIT also improves data center performance and efficiency
through such features as performance monitoring, performance tuning,
granular Quality of Service capabilities and dynamic, real-time
managing of the networking to meet application demands.
For its part, Voltaire is rolling out the Grid Director 4700, a 40
Gb/s InfiniBand switch, as well as its Unified Fabric Manager software.
The Grid Director 4700 offers 324 ports of 40 Gb/s connectivity, and
users can double that to 648 ports using the companys double-density
fabric board, which officials say are the foundation of Voltaires
HyperScale architecture. The stackable architecture is designed to let
IT administrators build larger configurations.
Combining the new switches with the HyperScale architecture enables
a user to build a 1,296-node supercomputer with a fabric that offers 40
percent lower latency than competing technologies, with 50 percent fewer
switch ports, 40 percent less cabling and 33 percent less power and
rack space, according to Voltaire officials.
The officials also are pushing the Voltaire offering for green data
centers, saying the switch offers a 6.5-watt-per-port power consumption
capability.
Voltaire officials are demonstrating the Grid Director 4700 as well as the companys recently announced Vantage 8500 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch at the supercomputing show, which runs June 23-26 in Hamburg, Germany.
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