Virtualization & Cloud Computing

As economic pressures drive data centers to reach new levels of efficiency, IT departments are adopting a service-oriented approach—consolidating and commoditizing server, storage, and network resources overlaid with virtualization and dynamic workload management. This approach lets IT deliver services faster with less effort and fewer physical resources.

Despite the obvious benefits, there are still a number of issues inhibiting wider adoption of virtualization and cloud computing solutions, including insufficient I/O capacity, inefficient network architectures, inadequate visibility and automation, and a lack of fabric isolation and SLA.

Voltaire solves these challenges using an integrated approach that incorporates a highly scalable, flat switching architecture, an application-driven fabric resource manager, and tools to accelerate and simplify storage access through fast caching and SAN I/O virtualization.

Voltaire virtualization and cloud computing solutions deliver:

Faster fabrics and I/O

Voltaire Vantage™ 10GbE switches and Voltaire Grid Director™ 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switches provide fast connectivity to address performance challenges, and can offload I/O virtualization tasks to the hardware, reducing I/O overhead.

Flat, scalable architecture

The Voltaire Vantage 8500 10GbE Layer 2 core switch and Voltaire Vantage 6048 and Voltaire Vantage 6024 converged 10GbE edge switches, orchestrated by Voltaire Unified Fabric Manager™ (UFM™) software, form a large logical switch that features the fastest core bandwidth, lowest latency, and central service oriented management. By eliminating expensive core network and storage switches and legacy designs, network bottlenecks are removed, infrastructure costs go down, management becomes simpler, and server mobility is possible while preserving application SLA.

Network virtualization and isolation

Voltaire’s scale-out switching fabric can be partitioned into multiple isolated virtual LAN, SAN, and IPC networks, and provides end-to-end policy enforcement for physical or virtual ports. This enables network consolidation, higher utilization, server mobility, and simpler management - without sacrificing security and isolation.

Real-time application SLA & isolation enforcement

Voltaire Unified Fabric Manager™ (UFM™) software provides central fabric resource management that can enforce policy in real-time across virtual I/O, virtual switches, edge or blade switches, and core switches. Upon VM migration, UFM keeps the connectivity and policy intact, eliminating potential security holes and maintaining service level guarantees.

Central fabric monitoring

Voltaire Unified Fabric Manager™ (UFM™) software aggregates statistics from physical and virtual switches, hypervisors, and optional third party tools, correlates them with virtual infrastructure and application topologies, and generates meaningful real-time application-centric information on traffic, I/O and bottlenecks. This can shorten troubleshooting time from weeks to seconds, and enables quick problem/root cause analyses in complex virtualized data centers, as well as improved data center automation. 

Faster storage access

As more virtual machines are deployed, storage access becomes the most critical bottleneck in the data center. Voltaire Storage Accelerator™ (VSA™) software is a unique storage software solution that provides faster performance for clients accessing legacy storage systems. In addition, it simplifies storage access through virtual I/O technology, and provides granular VM storage access statistics.

Network Architecture Scalable to Thousands of Nodes

Scale from one rack to hundreds without adding complexity or losing efficiency