BILLERICA, Mass., and HERZELIYA, Israel -- Voltaire Ltd., a leading provider of grid backbone solutions for datacenters, today announced a new customer support model whereby the company will provide support services to customers using Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) regardless of the brand of InfiniBand hardware used by the customer. Novell is the first customer to take advantage of the new offering.

OFED, a necessary component for operating InfiniBand-based fabrics, is a packaged version of the OpenFabrics Alliance's open-source software. It supports server interconnect and storage connectivity using RDMA-based InfiniBand and iWARP fabrics in Linux environments. The OFED software is integrated into major versions of Linux distributions from Novell and Red Hat. Voltaire has been a lead developer for OpenFabrics since its inception and contributes updates to the software on a continuous basis.

"Voltaire has provided top-tier global support services to our customers since the company was founded and we believe it's one of our core strengths," said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances at Voltaire. "This new support model allows us to provide full end-to-end support leveraging our expertise from the software to the switch hardware. Now, customers covered by a Voltaire support contract through our OEMs, resellers and partners can obtain Level 3 support for OFED regardless of whether they use InfiniBand switches from Voltaire or third party vendors."

Introducing Availability of Voltaire-Supported OFED 1.3

Voltaire also announced today the immediate availability of support for OFED version 1.3. Voltaire now offers an easily installable OFED distribution along with the availability of additional fixes and patches that have been discovered during the Voltaire testing and certification process. In addition to OFED 1.3's new enterprise-grade features such as Quality of Service (QoS) management capabilities that enable unified LAN, IPC and SAN applications over the same wire and integration of the Reliable Datagram Service (RDS) protocol which enhances performance of Oracle 11g RAC, Voltaire has improved on the software's high-availability bonding features furthering its usability for enterprise customers.

Voltaire's enhancements to OFED are continually contributed back to the OpenFabrics developer community so they may be used in future versions of OFED, in order to enable interoperability of InfiniBand fabrics.

The installation package for OFED 1.3 is available today and can be downloaded by Voltaire customers at www.voltaire.com/SupportAndServices/Drivers.

About Voltaire

Voltaire Ltd. designs and develops server and storage switching and software solutions that enable high-performance grid computing within the datacenter. Voltaire refers to its server and storage switching and software solutions as the Voltaire Grid Backbone. Voltaire's products leverage InfiniBand technology and include director-class switches, multi-service switches, fixed-port configuration switches, Ethernet and Fibre Channel routers and standards-based driver and management software. Voltaire's solutions have been sold to a wide range of end customers including governmental, research and educational organizations, as well as enterprises in the manufacturing, oil and gas, entertainment, life sciences and financial services industries. Founded in 1997, Voltaire Ltd. is headquartered in Herzeliya, Israel, and has its U.S. headquarters in Billerica, Mass. More information about Voltaire is available at www.voltaire.com.

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Source: Voltaire Ltd.