Voltaire Creates an Efficiency Edge for IT Executives and Data Center Managers with New GridVision™ Enterprise Software
Voltaire Creates an Efficiency Edge for IT Executives and Data Center Managers with New GridVision™ Enterprise SoftwareExtends and Automates Capabilities of Leading Grid Provisioning & Virtualization Solutions to Deliver Unprecedented Data Center Efficiency & Resource Utilization
BILLERICA, Mass. – September 25, 2006 – Voltaire, the worldwide leader in grid backbone solutions, today announced a first-of-its-kind software solution for the management and automation of dynamic grid computing environments in the data center. The software enables true automation of repetitive IT tasks associated with network, server and storage provisioning to deliver unprecedented efficiency. Provisioning tasks that used to take days and involve multiple groups within IT can now be reduced to seconds.
“GridVision™ Enterprise is the missing link for the provisioning and management of scalable, dynamic grids,” said Patrick Guay, senior vice president of marketing, Voltaire. “Together with Voltaire’s rack interconnect solutions supporting InfiniBand, Ethernet and Fibre Channel, Voltaire is delivering a best-in-class solution that provides enterprise customers with a new ‘efficiency edge’.”
GridVision™ Enterprise leverages advanced I/O and network virtualization technology embedded in Voltaire’s multi-service switches. GridVision automatically maps the relationships between application requirements and the physical or virtual data center environment consisting of servers, storage and networks to create a logical and highly efficient data center.
Employing an innovative abstracted object model, an intuitive graphical user interface and an open web services API, GridVision Enterprise integrates with leading server and storage virtualization solutions, as well as provisioning and scheduling tools, creating a single, logical data center environment consisting of both physical and virtual resources. This visionary approach to data center management dramatically improves the efficiency of resources while reducing operating costs. The once disparate data center islands of servers, networks and storage can now be unified to truly automate the provisioning and effective management of resources.
In today’s Fortune 500 data centers, a day-to-day project such as deploying a new application requires numerous manual tasks and “handshakes” between the infrastructure, server, storage and networking groups. New virtualization technologies can add even more complexity to the mapping of physical and virtual resources. End-to-end resource provisioning can take days or weeks depending on the size of the environment or workloads of the individual groups. GridVision Enterprise unifies the data center operating environment and allows operators to “instantaneously” complete these tasks.
GridVision Enterprise is initially designed for use in grid fabrics that leverage Voltaire Grid Director™ multi-service switches as the high performance interconnect. Voltaire Grid Director switches feature integrated InfiniBand, Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel, and deliver up to 60 Gigabits per second performance and latencies below 1/2 microsecond. Voltaire solutions are deployed in many of the world’s largest data centers in industries including financial services, manufacturing, government and media/entertainment.
Voltaire is working with partners such as AMD, FalconStor Software, IBM, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Novell, Platform Computing, United Devices, VMware and XenSource to integrate GridVision Enterprise with their grid computing and virtualization solutions.
“IBM shares in Voltaire’s open and standards-based approach to grid computing and in their vision for a more automated data center,” said Tamara Crawford, Program Director, IBM Grid Ecosystem Strategy. “As part of IBM's Grid and Grow ecosystem offerings, GridVision Enterprise provides businesses with a way to optimize their existing infrastructures in a grid environment that can expand to larger, more dynamic implementations as their needs grow.”
“As the vision of an Enterprise Grid evolves and encompasses compute resource virtualization, network virtualization and storage virtualization, Platform will continue to work with our eco-system of partners to deliver this value to our customers and to the market,” said Simon Lonsdale, Director of Strategic Alliances, Platform Computing. “Platform LSF and Platform Enterprise Grid Orchestrator (EGO) will integrate with Voltaire’s GridVision Enterprise software, providing network-aware scheduling and resource optimization to our Enterprise Data Center customers.”
For additional supporting quotes from many of these companies, please refer to the addendum at the end of this press release.
GridVision Enterprise will be available in December 2006. Beta trials are currently underway with customers worldwide. More detailed product information is available at http://www.voltaire.com/products/grid_vision.
About Voltaire
Voltaire is the worldwide leader in grid backbone solutions for networked computing in the next generation data center. Voltaire’s integrated family of switching hardware and network virtualization software delivers the high-performance, intelligent backbone for grid computing architectures. Leveraging the InfiniBand standard, Voltaire solutions offer improved performance, utilization and scalability across compute clusters, storage and IP networks. Voltaire solutions are available from major systems vendors and integrators. More information about Voltaire is available at www.voltaire.com or by calling 1-800-865-8247.
All product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Industry Support for Voltaire GridVision Enterprise
"Voltaire's I/O and network virtualization capabilities are a great complement to AMD64 virtualization,” said Sally Stevens, Director of Platform Solutions, AMD. "GridVision Enterprise will fill a sizeable gap in the market today by providing the ‘glue' between the virtual infrastructure building blocks of the next generation data center.”
"Off-the-shelf servers equipped with InfiniBand HCAs and disks can now be transformed with our software to become native InfiniBand storage servers with advanced, enterprise-class storage services such as snapshots and replication,” said Bernie Wu, Vice President Business Development for FalconStor. "We are pleased to work with Voltaire's GridVision Enterprise to enable automation of resources for dynamic grid environments.”
"IBM shares in Voltaire's open and standards-based approach to grid computing and in their vision for a more automated data center,” said Tamara Crawford, Program Director, IBM Grid Ecosystem Strategy. "As part of IBM's Grid and Grow ecosystem offerings, GridVision Enterprise provides businesses with a way to optimize their existing infrastructures in a grid environment that can expand to larger, more dynamic implementations as their needs grow.”
"Companies such as Voltaire are developing virtualization solutions that are welcomed from the industry in support of broader and more efficient data center virtualization deployments, server consolidation and other usage models enabled by the new Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® platform,” said Jim Pappas, Director of Initiatives Marketing at Intel Corporation. "Intel® Virtualization Technology and dual-core platforms deliver the capabilities end-users demand for high reliability deployments and are the foundation for companies such as Voltaire innovating in this space.”
"Voltaire's GridVision Enterprise solution provides a flexible operating environment for grid computing that integrates and extends the capabilities of leading server, storage and network provisioning tools,” said Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing for Mellanox Technologies. "We are delighted to see the integration of virtualization solutions with standards-based InfiniBand products, which together enhance the performance, automation and scalability of distributed computing environments.”
"As the vision of an Enterprise Grid evolves and encompasses compute resource virtualization, network virtualization and storage virtualization, Platform will continue to work with our eco-system of partners to deliver this value to our customers and to the market,” said Simon Lonsdale, Director of Strategic Alliances, Platform Computing. "Platform LSF and Platform Enterprise Grid Orchestrator (EGO) will integrate with Voltaire's GridVision Enterprise software, providing network-aware scheduling and resource optimization to our Enterprise Data Center customers.”
"Voltaire's GridVision Enterprise Software aligns well with United Devices's vision of the next generation data center,” said Dr. Jikku Venkat, UD's chief technology officer. "The UD Data Center Grid Solution integrated with Voltaire's GridVision fulfills a fundamental requirement to link storage and network with server resources. We look forward to working with Voltaire in integrating the two environments.”
"Voltaire's GridVision Enterprise software provides a much needed solution for developing a common platform to unify server and storage virtualization solutions in the data center,” said Benn Schreiber, Director of Business Development, XenSource. "With the integration of XenSource's server virtualization solutions and GridVision Enterprise, businesses can expect to achieve unprecedented levels of operational agility.”