Grid Director™ Switches

Voltaire® Grid Director™ switches enable high performance applications to run on distributed server, storage and network resources. Multiple Grid Director switches can be interconnected to form very large high performance clusters and grids that can grow into the thousands of nodes with "pay as you grow" scalability.

Multiple Voltaire Grid Director ISR 2012s can be interconnected to form very large clusters.

 

Product Comparison
	Grid Director ISR 9024	Grid Director 4036	Grid Director ISR 2004	Grid Director ISR 2012
Rack Height	1U	1U	6U	15U
Rack Width	19"	19 "	19"	19"
Backplane Bandwidth	960 Gbps	2.88 Tbps	3.84 Tbps	11.52 Tbps
Line Board	0	0	4	12
Fabric Boards	0	0	4	4
Max # of InfiniBand Ports	24 20Gbps InfiniBand Ports	36 40Gbps InfiniBand Ports	96 20Gbps InfiniBand Ports	288 20Gbps InfiniBand Ports
Integrated IO	No	No	Yes	Yes
Interface Type	4X 20Gbps (DDR) CX4 ports with support for optical adapters and cables	4X 40Gbps (QDR) QSFP ports with support for optical adapters and cables	4X 20 Gbps (DDR) CX4 ports with support for optical adapters and cables	4X 20 Gbps (DDR) CX4 ports with support for optical adapters and cables
Redundant Components	Power Supplies	Power Supplies	Power Supplies (sPSUs), Fan Units (sFUs), Management Boards (sMB)	Power Supplies (sPSUs), Fan Units (sFUs), Management Boards (sMB)
Embedded Fabric Management	Optional	Yes	Yes	Yes

 

Voltaire Server & Storage Switching Solutions

Voltaire is a leading provider of server and storage switching and software solutions that enable high-performance grid computing within the data center. Voltaire’s integrated family of switching hardware and network virtualization software delivers the high-performance, unified fabric for high performance data centers. Leveraging the InfiniBand interconnect architecture, Voltaire solutions offer improved performance, utilization and scalability for its customers’ high-performance computing needs.

The Voltaire Grid Director Family of switches provides cost-effective building blocks for fully non-blocking topologies of thousands of nodes for HPC, manufacturing, energy, financial, media, life sciences and other compute-intensive applications. Combined with the integrated Ethernet and Fiber Channel routing capabilities, Voltaire’s unified fabric switches enable the full benefits of grid computing by providing access to virtualization of all computing resources on the network.

Voltaire solutions help to solve many important challenges of today’s data centers.

• Eliminate Bottlenecks – With the trend of multi-socket, multi-core environments, server I/O is a major bottleneck. Voltaire switches eliminate the imbalance by providing servers with up to a 40 Gbps InfiniBand fabric with application latencies as low as 100 nanoseconds. Voltaire’s integrated Ethernet and Fibre Channel connectivity lets you share the power of InfiniBand with your data center LAN and SAN networks to improve the performance of existing network infrastructure.
• Reduce Complexity – Managing separate networks for storage, IPC and LAN based traffic is expensive and complicated. Voltaire solutions reduce complexity by creating a Unified Fabric for the data center with seamless connectivity between InfiniBand, Ethernet and Fibre Channel based networks. You no longer need 3 separate network technologies with multiple network adapters to operate your data center fabric which greatly simplifes the requirements on server hardware.
• Improve Efficiency – Voltaire solutions accelerate application performance and enable scalability into the thousands of nodes. Moreover, with high bandwidths, low latencies and error-free data delivery, application performance won’t be hurt by packet retransmissions of lost information.
• Reduce Environmental Costs– Improved application efficiency along with the need for fewer network adapters allows you to accomplish the same amount of work using fewer more cost-effective servers. With improved cooling mechanisms comes reduced power consumption and heat generation allowing data centers to reduce the costs associated with physical space, power and cooling.