Voltaire® Grid Director™ 4036E

QDR InfiniBand switch with integrated low latency Ethernet gateway

The Voltaire Grid Director 4036E is a high performance, low latency and fully non- blocking InfiniBand switch, which includes a built-in low latency Ethernet gateway for bridging traffic to and from Ethernet-based networks or storage. This self-contained solution combines an InfiniBand switch, an embedded subnet manager, and a built-in, hardware-based low latency Ethernet gateway in a compact 1U device.

With thirty-four 40 Gb/s InfiniBand ports (delivering 2.72 Tb/s), less than 100 nanoseconds of port-to-port latency, and two 1/10Gb Ethernet ports bridging traffic in less than two microseconds, I/O bottlenecks are removed making applications operate at maximum efficiency, and its smart design makes it easily useful for both small and large clusters.

Accelerating Applications Across Different Networks

With its high bandwidth, low latency and reduced overhead, InfiniBand is the ideal choice for speeding application performance while simultaneously consolidating network and I/O infrastructure. Combining InfiniBand and Ethernet into a single solution provides the ideal rack backbone for next generation data centers.

There are many applications, services and resources that reside on Ethernet LANs, or that cannot benefit from the capabilities of InfiniBand. By utilizing InfiniBand to connect application servers and Voltaire’s multi-service switch solutions to seamlessly connect Ethernet, InfiniBand and Fibre Channel networks, IT organizations reduce complexity and cost and can concentrate on providing reliable, scalable, high performance solutions rather than on the specifics of the technology.

Much More than Just Bridging

Accelerating applications across multiple network technologies requires much more than just fast bridging of data from one protocol to another. The Grid Director 4036E leverages Voltaire’s experience in both InfiniBand and Ethernet technologies, including years of experience deploying InfiniBand-to-Ethernet gateways in commercial environments, in order to efficiently handle a variety of advanced networking protocols and ensure fast, seamless integration between the environments. These capabilities include:

• Transparent mapping between Ethernet VLANs and InfiniBand partitions to ensure continuity of security and service levels
• Accelerating IP multicast over InfiniBand using hardware-based multicast
• Flow control support over both InfiniBand and Ethernet links for efficient handling of congestion
• Layer 2/3/4-based packet filtering and classification
• Link aggregation (LAG) between Ethernet ports
• Aggregation of Ethernet ports from multiple gateways for scalability or redundancy purposes

Enterprise Applications

The Grid Director 4036E delivers improved performance and lowers costs for a variety of enterprise applications:

Financial Services: Market data feeds typically run multicast traffic over 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet which the Grid Director 4036E significantly accelerates by seamlessly mapping it to hardware-based InfiniBand multicast. When used with Voltaire’s Messaging Acceleration (VMA) software, even greater latency reduction can be achieved. 

Databases: Clustered or scale-out databases often rely on InfiniBand for the interconnect fabric and 10 Gigabit Ethernet NAS for storage.  The Grid Director 4036E combines the InfiniBand clustering and storage access in one device, simplifying configurations, while boosting performance and reducing costs.

High Performance Storage: The use of 10 Gigabit Ethernet storage is growing popular in industries ranging from energy to manufacturing and life sciences. The Grid Director 4036E’s built-in gateway seamlessly bridges the InfiniBand cluster to 10 Gigabit Ethernet storage providing maximum bandwidth for each node accessing the storage. It also reduces the overall solution cost by eliminating the need for a dedicated storage network.

Configuration Example:
Mid-size two-tier CLOS InfiniBand cluster connected to Ethernet-based high-performance storage