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Voltaire Ltd. has announced the release of a 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching strategy which is specially designed to improve the user experience and economies of data center networking.

This scale-out Ethernet architecture is based on Layer 2 core switches using Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) technology which includes features of the InfiniBand. This offers customers a more scalable, low latency and virtualized 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabric with reduced power consumption.

The new 10 Gigabit Ethernet offerings augment Voltaire’s family of 20 and 40 Gbps InfiniBand switching platforms and software. Customers have the option of choosing the underlying data center fabric which is based on their application requirements and technology.

“With the growth of consolidation, virtualization and cloud computing in the data center, the core of the data center network is currently undergoing an evolution of requirements with the development of new network technologies specifically for the data center,” said Mark Fabbi, vice president, Enterprise Networking, Gartner (News - Alert) Research.

Fabbi added, “These new high-end data center requirements are opening the door for innovation, causing a new category of Layer 2 core switches to emerge enabling high-capacity, scale-out fabrics to support 1000s of servers that don’t require the expensive, multi-tiered architecture of days gone by.”

Voltaire’s scale-out Ethernet architecture incorporates new high-density Layer 2 core switches based on CEE standards. Eliminating the usage of hierarchical switching tiers, fewer switches can be used thereby increasing scalability and performance and reducing management efforts and cost.

Ronnie Kenneth, chairman and chief executive officer, Voltaire explained that the multi-tiered approach to data center Ethernet networking used presently is expensive and outdated. Voltaire’s unique scale-out approach to Ethernet simplifies and flattens the network to improve data center networking economics.

The scale-out Ethernet fabric of Voltaire has been designed to be linearly scalable when deployed in large setups of thousands of nodes. It uses high-density, low latency, energy-efficient and Layer 2 non-blocking switches. The Ethernet fabric can run LAN, IPC (News - Alert) and storage (including FCoE) traffic simultaneously with service attributes and dynamic congestion management.

The fabric is also virtualization-aware and it provides application- and service-driven fabric monitoring and SLA enforcement. The Ethernet fabric supports industry-standard servers, third party switches, management and virtualization solutions.