Voltaire® Grid Director™ 2004

The Industry’s First “DDR by Design” 20 Gbps InfiniBand Switch Enabling Scalable High-Performance Clusters with Ultra-Low BER

Introducing the Voltaire Grid Director 2004

The Voltaire Grid Director 2004 multi-service switch enables high performance applications to run on distributed server, storage and network resources. Multiple Grid Director 2004s 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. High performance environments require no-compromise solutions. The Voltaire Grid Director 2004 delivers just that -- with up to 96 ports of error-free 20 gigabits per second InfiniBand connectivity. Ultra low latencies and an impressive 3.84 terabits per second non-blocking backplane eliminate communication bottlenecks, allowing applications to perform at maximum efficiency. As the industry’s largest multi-service switching solution, the Grid Director 2004 provides unprecedented levels of performance and scalability for large, high performance computing environments and grids.

Purpose-Built for the Next Generation Data Center

The Grid Director 2004 is Voltaire’s second generation director class 20 Gbps InfiniBand switch. Voltaire’s considerable experience deploying high performance interconnects in the world’s fastest supercomputers and high performance data centers was used to create the perfect building block for clusters and grids that scale into the thousands of nodes. The industry-leading design of the Grid Director 2004 provides reliable packet delivery with the best signal quality available. The reliable delivery of packets increases application efficiency by avoiding costly packet drops and retransmissions associated with alternative solutions. With its excellent signal integrity, the Grid Director 2004 supports copper InfiniBand cables up to 14m and optical InfiniBand cables up to 100m extending the reach of high performance computing systems and increasing data center scalability. This becomes increasingly important as grids and clusters scale and require more space in the data center requiring longer cable reaches.

Multi-service Connectivity

In addition to scalable InfiniBand switching, the Grid Director 2004 offers powerful multi-protocol connectivity in a single, flexible system. The chassis supports the use of high performance IO modules providing seamless connectivity between server clusters, FC SANs, NAS appliances, IP SANs and TCP/IP networks (LANs).

Comprehensive Management

The Grid Director 2004 provides comprehensive and powerful management capabilities through GridVision InfiniBand Fabric Management Software. The management capabilities are enabled in the switch independent of any external management platform and can be accessed via CLI, GUI or SNMP managers. GridVision delivers real-time proactive management by providing: aggregated fabric and resource views, access to a suite of fabric and switch diagnostics, the ability to manage fail-over on all levels, and provisioning of InfiniBand fabrics and the attached server, networking and storage resources.

Built-in Reliability, Availability and Supportability (RAS)

The Grid Director 2004 was designed for data center administrators who want to spend time delivering business results and less time worrying about problems. All critical components including power supplies, fans and management controllers have built-in redundancy ensuring maximum system up time and supportability. Redundant management boards maintain synchronization so that a failure can be recovered without the loss of management information or any disruption in communication.