Voltaire Ltd. announced the industry’s first 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switch with a built-in low latency Ethernet gateway for seamlessly bridging traffic to and from Ethernet-based networks. The Grid Director 4036E features thirty-four, fully non-blocking 40 Gb/s InfiniBand ports (delivering 2.72 Tb/s), less than 100 nanoseconds of port-to-port latency, and two 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports bridging traffic in less than two microseconds. The switch is designed as a self-contained complete solution in a compact 1U device. It includes an InfiniBand switch, an embedded subnet manager, and a built-in hardware-based low latency Ethernet gateway, ensuring that I/O bottlenecks are removed and applications operate at maximum efficiency.

The Grid Director 4036E delivers improved performance and lowers costs for a variety of enterprise applications:

Financial Services
Market data feeds typically run multicast traffic over 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet which the Grid Director 4036E significantly accelerates by seamlessly mapping it to hardware-based InfiniBand multicast. When used with Voltaire’s Messaging Acceleration (VMA) software, even greater latency reduction can be achieved. Designed in a space-saving, energy-efficient, 1U form factor, the switch is ideal for co-located low-latency trading environments.

High Performance Storage
10 Gigabit Ethernet storage is used in many industries ranging from energy, to manufacturing and life sciences. The Grid Director 4036E’s built-in gateway seamlessly bridges the InfiniBand cluster to 10 Gigabit Ethernet storage providing maximum bandwidth for each node accessing the storage. It also reduces the overall solution cost by eliminating the need for a dedicated storage network.

Databases
Clustered or scale-out databases often rely on InfiniBand for the interconnect fabric and 10 Gigabit Ethernet NAS for storage. The Grid Director 4036E combines the InfiniBand clustering and storage access in one device, simplifying configurations, while boosting performance and reducing costs.