Voltaire, an InfiniBand loyalist through thick and thin – mostly thin for the last 10 years – has decided it’s long past time to stop beating its head against the wall and expand into Ethernet especially now that InfiniBand and Ethernet are starting to resemble each other and it can bring something to the party.
What it’s bringing is a scale-out Ethernet architecture – based on the next-generation Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) technology that leverages characteristics inherent in InfiniBand – like a lossless fabric, cut-through switching and I/O virtualization – supporting what Voltaire likes to think of as “virtual mainframes” built out of industry-standard elements that make extensive use of virtualization (in other words, “the cloud”).
Actually Voltaire thinks Ethernet “stole” specs from InfiniBand but that’s another story. The so-called CEE standard hasn’t been etched in stone yet but Voltaire’s pretty sure where it’s going to wind up later this year. It can always reprogram if things change.
Anyway, it says its new widgetry, under development for more than 18 months, will improve the user experience and the economics of data center networking. It will also give Voltaire a less fussy crowd of potential users with less rigid performance requirements to cultivate than it’s had with InfiniBand.
Its new fabric is supposed to be a linearly scalable, low-latency, virtualized 10 gigE fabric with lower overall fabric costs and power consumption, greater efficiencies and simplified management even with thousands of nodes.
Voltaire’s approach flattens the expensive hierarchical switching tiers of a Cisco-based configuration that it calls “outdated,” “lacking in innovation” and a pathway to vendor lock-in.
The company claims that a customer building a 1,000-node data center with its magic can get 10x less latency and 4x faster core performance using 3x less switch power consumption for half the price of “alternatives.”
Voltaire says that means saving millions of the dollars.
And for good measure Voltaire says what it’s offering is an open standards architecture as opposed to what it calls Cisco’s Nexus lock-in, which “turns a data center into a Cisco appliance.”
Much of Voltaire’s rhetoric and positioning is now anti-Cisco and Cisco’s entrance into the server market has reportedly prodded Cisco’s competitors IBM and HP to cozy up to Voltaire, setting in train a fight between a standards-based solution and a proprietary one.
Voltaire got Merrill Lynch Research, now a Bank of America property, to opine that “Voltaire will likely be the first company in the market with a working Ethernet-based scalable solution. The company could utilize its vast experience in building grids or fabrics of servers, gained via years of building InfiniBand networks and we believe it may be the only company to have a truly scalable solution already in 2009 – far exceeding Cisco’s specs.”
Voltaire’s mojo is called a natural extension to its 20 Gb/s and 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switches and software and lets users choose their underlying data center fabric.
For its scale-out data center architecture Voltaire has built new high-density Layer 2 core switches that can be clustered to form large, linearly scaling Layer 2 fabrics. But one fabric can reportedly run LAN, IPS and storage traffic simultaneously with guaranteed service attributes and dynamic congestion management.
Its scheme puts L3-L7 switching and services at the edge on the theory that load balancing, say, isn’t needed on every switch.
So imagine L2 data center core switching as high-density, supporting many more nodes in a smaller footprint at a reduced budget; that allows large-scale L2 networks with a high bisectional Multipath bandwidth; that’s virtualization-aware, applying policies to VMs; and that’s multi-class, both lossless and lossy, enabling storage and IPC (lossless) with traditional LAN (lossy) while mitigating the congestion of lossless networks.
There’s also sine-qua-non fabric management software that controls all the physical and virtual switches and I/O devices in the fabric and does fabric monitoring and service-oriented policy enforcement.
Voltaire is not of course abandoning its InfiniBand heritage; it simply wants to see InfiniBand finally deliver on its original promise of being mainstream.
Last year the company’s revenues were up 16% to all of $62 million and it ended Q4 with $55 million in the bank but since going public in July of 2007 it’s only seen four profitable quarters. It wants that to change.
That’s why future software products have been designed to work on both InfiniBand and Ethernet.
The new chips are due later this year, when pricing will be available.