June 10, 2009 -- Voltaire has introduced its Vantage 8500, a Layer 2 core, non-blocking 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10-GbE) switching platform optimized for enterprise data centers and cloud computing environments.
Designed to simplify and consolidate network tiers for lowered infrastructure expenses, the Vantage 8500 data center switch features 288 wire speed, 10-GbE ports in a 15U high chassis. The switch features Voltaire's scale-out stacking option, enabling more than 3,400 non-blocking ports in a single switching fabric for extreme scalability. Future versions of the switch are expected to include even denser line cards for higher port counts.
The Vantage 8500 is based on converged enhanced Ethernet (CEE) technology to provide InfiniBand-like capabilities to the data center, such as a loss-less switching fabric, multi-pathing, virtualization, fabric-wide congestion management, and QoS.
Voltaire maintains that the increasing adoption of virtualization is driving the need for new data center network architectures that offer improved I/O bandwidth, without adding extra tiers and oversubscription to the network. The company says the Vantage 8500's scale-out design provides advantages to data centers implementing virtualization by enabling predictable, consistent 10 Gbit/sec throughput.
"Virtualization breaks the old network architecture and creates a need for a new approach to data center networking," explains Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. "With virtualization, a three-tiered architecture with oversubscription no longer works -- customers need a solution with a non-blocking core that can scale linearly. The Voltaire Vantage 8500 will be available this year to address the virtualization, scalability, low latency, low power and low cost requirements of scale-out data center customers."
The switch supports industry standard servers, third-party switches, and leading management and virtualization solutions. It is interoperable with both 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet solutions for integration with existing data centers and mixed environments.
Full press release:Voltaire Announces Vantage 8500 Ethernet Switch for Scale-Out Data Centers and Cloud Computing Environments