Cisco Virtualization Journal

On a scale of one to 10 HP's pretty ticked at Cisco's brass in elbowing into the server market - enough for it to join IBM in hurrying over to Voltaire and signing up for its new 10 gigabit Ethernet switch.

Emily Post would probably say Voltaire owes Cisco a bouquet of flowers - about the size Chicago gangsters send to funerals - for steering the two trophy accounts its way, since Cisco may have sacrificed its 77% market share to go adventuring.

Voltaire marketing VP Asaf Somekh suggests that the champagne in Cisco's bathtub could be drained in three-five years. Voltaire was able to nail both IBM and HP quicker than it thought it could.

HP's peckishness is underscored by the fact that Voltaire is new to Ethernet chips, its history being in InfiniBand, as well as the fact that HP is spending $2.7 billion to buy 3Com. Somekh says 3Com doesn't have the equivalent of Voltaire's scale.

Anyway, HP's picking up the Voltaire 10 gigE Vantage 8500 switch, its 40 Gb/s QDR InfiniBand director switch and its Unified Fabric Manager software (UFM) as part of its Unified Cluster Portfolio.

The widgetry, fleshed out with servers, storage, edge switches, middleware and networking and scaling to thousands of servers, is meant for clouds, large HPC systems and next-generation virtualized data centers, exactly where Cisco is headed.

The Vantage 8500's credits include less than a microsecond latency and low 10-watts-per-port power consumption. In fact it's supposed to have the lowest solution cost, power consumption and latency available.

It also enables simplified, flat, scale-out fabrics, which means that, unlike traditional hierarchical network designs, 12 of these babies can be clustered together to support thousands of servers.

Voltaire's new Grid Director 4700, its 40 Gb/s QDR InfiniBand director switch, features 324 ports of 40 Gb/s InfiniBand connectivity, with the option of doubling capacity to 648 ports using the company's HyperScale fabric boards. Its stackable architecture enables configurations of hundreds and thousands of nodes. It claims lower latency and greater simplicity than alternative solutions.

HP also signed up for Voltaire's UFM software. Used with its 20 or 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switches, the stuff tickles the CPUs in the line cards to get engaged in computing and eliminates part of the traffic, enhancing performance. It also provides visibility into the fabric, which Voltaire says is valuable to IT managers running complex environments that include virtualization or multiple applications with varying service level requirements.