DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 30, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 26    ( Table of Contents )

Breaking News - Storage:

Voltaire Takes iSCSI To The High-End

Voltaire, a leader in intelligent connectivity for high performance InfiniBand solutions, unveiled its storage connectivity solutions for InfiniBand clusters. Voltaire is the first to leverage iSCSI and InfiniBand together in one solution, to provide a high performance connectivity to Fibre Channel (FC) and IP storage area networks (SANs). The Voltaire solution provides extensive management and virtualization capabilities, which are embedded in Voltaire's InfiniBand-to-FC routers leveraging the broad management and protocol standardization of iSCSI.

Replacing the TCP/IP transport with InfiniBand eliminates the performance bottlenecks associated with iSCSI today. The Voltaire solution provides the highest performance with very little CPU overhead. Voltaire's solution eliminates the over-provisioning of storage networks with shared and efficient connectivity and reduces the overall TCO of server/storage connectivity by minimizing the number of protocols and management tools required. The result is a comprehensive, easy to deploy solution that supports Fibre Channel SANs, IP SANs and NAS connectivity with an easy upgrade path to RDMA over Ethernet in the future.

"Voltaire's innovative use of the iSCSI protocol with InfiniBand will enable them to leapfrog their competition in terms of ease of management and high- speed throughput for high end computing environments," said Arun Taneja, Founder and Consulting Analyst, Taneja Group. "Not only are they enabling connectivity between InfiniBand and shared storage on Fibre Channel, they have also created an iSCSI solution on steroids. Many customers looking to standardize on iSCSI were concerned that there would not be high end solutions available. Now they have an option."

"We are delighted to be working with Voltaire to provide our advanced chip sets to help enable this pioneering technology," said Rob Davis, Vice President of Advanced Technology, QLogic Corporation. "QLogic shares Voltaire's vision for this high performance storage interconnect, to help enterprise customers achieve greater data management and simplify the deployment of their high-performance storage networks."

"As our InfiniBand solutions gain traction in the data center, there is a growing demand to leverage InfiniBand for storage connectivity. After a thorough evaluation of customers' feedback, we believe that the promise of seamless and high-performance storage connectivity is best served by an iSCSI- based solution. By leveraging the rich iSCSI based management infrastructure, the Voltaire solution provides superior performance and manageability without reinventing the wheel," said Ronnie Kenneth, Chairman and CEO, Voltaire.

Voltaire FC connectivity is implemented through intelligent InfiniBand-to- Fibre Channel routers. These routers aggregate the connectivity of InfiniBand server clusters and SANs, eliminating I/O bottlenecks while improving storage manageability and reducing costs. The routers are integrated with Voltaire's family of modular switch router chassis. The Voltaire InfiniBand switch routers with their FC and IP connectivity provide multi-protocol routing at the heart of the data center for clustering and storage networking. The Voltaire storage solution will commence customer deployment in Q3 2003.