Voltaire Scale-Out Ethernet Products

Voltaire Scale-Out Ethernet

Delivering Performance and Choice

With Voltaire’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet products, including the Vantage™ 8500 core switch and the Vantage™ 6024 and Vantage™ 6048 top of rack switches, a broader array of end users with less rigid performance requirements than those addressed by InfiniBand can benefit from a more scalable and high-performance Ethernet fabric. Voltaire’s scale-out fabrics also support industry-standard servers and storage, giving customers the freedom to choose the data center components that best suit their needs for a best-of-breed, customized solution.

Voltaire allows customers to choose the fabric that is right for them based on their application requirements and individual technology practices—without sacrificing scalability and performance.

Data Center Connectivity with 10 Gigabit Ethernet

Voltaire’s scale-out 10GbE products enable users to benefit from a far more scalable, lower latency, and virtualized fabric with lower overall fabric costs and power consumption, greater efficiencies, and simplified management than traditional 10 GbE fabrics.

Using its extensive knowledge and expertise building scale-out fabrics for data centers, Voltaire’s 10GbE fabric is uniquely designed to be: 

• Linearly Scalable – Maintains high performance, low costs and ease of management even when deployed in very large setups consisting of thousands of nodes.
• Efficient – Optimized design uses high-density, low latency, energy-efficient and low cost Layer 2 non-blocking switches.
• Converged – One fabric can run LAN, IPC, and storage (including FCoE) traffic simultaneously with guaranteed service attributes and dynamic congestion management.
• Virtualized and Service Oriented – Provides application and service-driven fabric monitoring and SLA enforcement, with awareness and policy enforcement at the virtual machine granularity.
• Open and Standard – Supports third-party top-of-rack, blade or virtual switches, and management and orchestration solutions through standard APIs and plug-ins— allowing users to create powerful unified computing solutions.

A New Architectural Approach to Ethernet

Traditional Ethernet network configurations are designed with a scale-up approach in mind. In this type of configuration, a large, heavyweight, expensive core switch sits at the center of the network with all traffic feeding into it. Because these large core switches are overloaded with functionality, they are too slow, too expensive, and require too much power—and become a bottleneck.

As data centers grow in size and capacity, there is a need to re-think the way we connect server, storage, and external resources in the data center. Rather than building an expensive, hierarchical network that can’t scale, networks should be built as scale-out fabrics following scale-out trends in computing and storage. The scale-out fabric is formed by connecting multiple lightweight switching devices in a mesh topology that achieves a much larger and faster fabric with lower cost, power consumption, and end-to-end latency.

Traditional Ethernet configurations use a hierarchical approach, while the flat architecture of Voltaire’s scale-out Ethernet solutions allows greater scalability.

At the center of Voltaire’s scale-out data center fabric architecture are new high-density Layer 2 core switches based on CEE standards that deliver a converged, high-density, low latency, low power, lossless and virtualized data center fabric. The switches can be clustered to form large, linearly scaling Layer 2 fabrics. The solution also encompasses fabric management software that controls all the physical and virtual switches and I/O devices in the fabric and provides central fabric monitoring and service-oriented policy enforcement.

Instead of using many hierarchical switching tiers that are constrained by the performance of its root, the Voltaire approach allows greater scalability while guaranteeing higher performance, simpler management, and lower costs.

For a customer building a 1000 node data center, this approach delivers 10X lower latency and 4X faster core performance for half the price, using 3X less power than alternative solutions.

Bringing the Best of InfiniBand to Ethernet

Today, Voltaire provides high-performance InfiniBand fabrics for the world’s largest supercomputers, the fastest financial trading platforms, and design and engineering clusters for global manufacturing, energy, life sciences and media companies. Voltaire’s 10GbE offerings are a natural extension to our family of 20 and 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switching platforms and software.

InfiniBand was designed as a scale-out data center fabric with a very lightweight switching infrastructure, the ability to run mesh topologies and multiple paths, and with fabric and I/O partitioning capabilities and central discovery and policy management. Over the past few years, the IEEE has been working to add InfiniBand-like capabilities to Ethernet on order to form the new Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE). This standard would allow the use of Ethernet as a unified and scale-out data center fabric, making technology developed by InfiniBand vendors, such as Voltaire, very relevant to Ethernet.

Ethernet, CEE, and InfiniBand Compared