Voltaire Advances Cluster and Grid Computing With New Solutions for High Performance Storage

BEDFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 28, 2004--

Industry-First Combination of Scalable Parallel File I/O, Block I/O and IPC over InfiniBand Delivers 6X Performance Improvement; Multiple Solutions Address Progressive and Legacy Storage Environments

“InfiniBand has already improved the performance of clusters and grids dramatically, said Arun Jain, vice president of marketing, Voltaire.”

Voltaire, a leading provider of interconnect solutions for high performance grid computing, today announced several new solutions that enable high performance storage on clusters and grids. The solutions, which include parallel file systems and scalable clustered NAS over InfiniBand, deliver extremely high I/O bandwidth reducing storage overhead and increasing the application processing power of every server node in the cluster. Designed for use with the Voltaire InfiniBand Switch Router family including the Voltaire ISR 9288, a 288 port InfiniBand switch, HPC customers can build scalable clusters of hundreds to thousands of nodes with better server utilization and increased performance.

To offer scalable file I/O for clusters, Voltaire has integrated its grid interconnect solutions with multiple parallel file system solutions. The first two to be supported are PVFS2 (Parallel Virtual File System 2), an open source software solution used in high performance computing environments, and Terrascale's TerraGrid(TM) parallel I/O platform, a commercial software solution that transforms standard Linux file systems such as ext2 into scalable parallel file systems. For customers requiring large scale network file system (NFS) solutions, Voltaire also introduced a highly scalable, clustered NAS solution that combines Terrascale's TerraGrid middleware and Voltaire's interconnect solutions. The solutions are ideally suited to improve performance of data intensive applications used in industries such as manufacturing, oil and gas exploration, government, financial services, bioinformatics and the scientific community.

"InfiniBand has already improved the performance of clusters and grids dramatically, said Arun Jain, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. "Now, it is time to advance clustering beyond high performance interprocessor communication and extend the power of InfiniBand to storage networking. Through our partnerships with leading storage innovators and tested integration with open source offerings, Voltaire now has a wealth of solutions to enable powerful storage I/O for enterprise and HPC clusters and grids."

Eliminating the Storage Bottleneck with Scalable File I/O Solutions

PVFS2 is a new parallel and clustered file system that enables scalable I/O for large HPC clusters. Specifically designed for large scale cluster systems, PVFS2 uses a stateless design that reduces the risk of cascading failures and the resources required for clustering large numbers of nodes. Used in combination with Voltaire's interconnect solutions, customer can now deploy file systems that can scale to thousands of nodes with total file storage capabilities of multiple petabytes.

"We've used our 128 node Voltaire InfiniBand cluster to port PVFS2 to run over InfiniBand," said Dr. Pete Wyckoff, Research Scientist at the Ohio Supercomputer Center. "PVFS2 is used in production to provide a high-performance parallel I/O capability to our users for their data-intensive applications. Running PVFS2 over InfiniBand further increases data throughput and lowers metadata access latencies."

In partnership with Terrascale (www.terrascale.com), Voltaire offers a second solution that transforms the POSIX compliant standard Linux ext2 file system into a linearly scalable high performance parallel file system with a unified namespace. Performance tests conducted by Terrascale indicate that using Voltaire interconnect solutions and TerraGrid software for direct storage I/O in a cluster delivers 6X greater performance throughput than NFS over GbE.

Offering Customer Choice with Scalable Clustered NAS Solutions

For customers using NFS/CIFS in their networked storage environments, Voltaire and TerraScale introduced today a solution for scalable clustered NAS. The new solution converts "off-the-shelf" elements into linearly scalable and robust NAS solutions that provide fast and efficient access to a unified namespace up to sixteen petabytes in size. The InfiniBand grid-based solution is more flexible and cost-effective than monolithic proprietary NAS systems that are often used for large-scale applications. The solution leverages iSCSI RDMA over InfiniBand for high performance back-end storage connectivity.

"Storage has often been the bottleneck in large clusters, essentially limiting the size of clusters that are practical. And while the vendor community has done a decent job in solving the file I/O problem using proprietary technologies, Voltaire is enabling the creation of massive clusters using industry standard platforms and technologies, such as iSCSI RDMA and InfiniBand, for both block and file I/O," said Arun Taneja, Founder and Consulting Analyst, The Taneja Group. "These solutions will put a lot of pressure on proprietary products very quickly."

Voltaire's interconnect solutions for high performance storage are available immediately. More information about Voltaire's solutions and open source PVFS2 files are available at www.voltaire.com.

About Voltaire

Voltaire is a leading provider of high performance InfiniBand solutions for enterprise data centers and HPC environments. Voltaire's InfiniBand solutions deliver significant return on investment to the data center by improving the performance and utilization of clustered databases, shared servers and storage. For HPC customers, Voltaire leads the industry with the largest InfiniBand Trade Association-certified switch to support clusters scaling from hundreds to thousands of nodes. With business headquarters near Boston, Massachusetts, Voltaire is certified by the IBTA's Integrator's List. More information about Voltaire is available at www.voltaire.com or by calling 1-800-865-8247.