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Voltaire Ltd., a provider of scale-out data center fabrics, announced plans to deliver 14 data rate (FDR) InfiniBand switching platforms, which adhere to the InfiniBand Trade Association’s (IBTA) specifications for next-generation InfiniBand.

Expected to be available in the second half of 2011, the new FDR InfiniBand switch platform will deliver an 80 percent increase in server-to-server throughput and improved scalability for faster application runtime.

In addition, these new switches will also have full compatibility with the company’s portfolio of application acceleration and fabric orchestration software to facilitate greater fabric performance, scalability and management.

“Voltaire (News - Alert) is committed to the HPC market and we are aggressively developing solutions based on InfiniBand to continue to the lead the market in performance and scalability,” said Asaf Somekh (News - Alert), vice president of marketing, Voltaire, said in a statement. “FDR InfiniBand will address the needs of HPC customers who require the highest bandwidths and the utmost scalability to drive their applications.”

According to a press release, the Voltaire switches are aligned with the anticipated release of next generation server platforms and PCIe 3.0.

Somekh said that the next generation of Voltaire switches will be the scale-out fabric of choice for future petascale and exascale clusters that will be delivered via company’s OEM partners.

The company’s Grid Director switches provide high-performance InfiniBand connectivity as well as low latency to enable high-performance applications to run on distributed server, network and storage resources.

In addition, these switches have a power-efficient design and will deliver low power and cooling requirements. These switches are utilized by customers in industries such as financial services, manufacturing, energy, life sciences and HPC.

Voltaire offers unique software solutions for its InfiniBand platforms. These platforms enhance application performance and management of scale-out environments.

The company’s Fabric Collective Accelerator (FCA) software, Messaging Accelerator (VMA) software, Storage Accelerator (VSA) software and Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) software are currently available for Voltaire’s QDR InfiniBand fabrics.

Officials with Voltaire said that the company intends to make FCA, VMA, VSA, and UFM available for their upcoming FDR InfiniBand platforms at first general availability.

Marc Sultzbaugh, vice president of worldwide sales at Mellanox (News - Alert) Technologies, said in a statement, “FDR InfiniBand-based solutions will address the market need for even higher application performance, delivering improved efficiency, scalability, and return on investment for the next wave of scale-out computing systems.”

According to a press release, Voltaire announced that its switches provide the server-to-server or server-to-storage interconnect fabric for 56 percent of the InfiniBand deployments on the 36th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers released this week. This represents more than double the share of any other InfiniBand systems vendor.