Profile: Voltaire Ltd. (VOLT.O)

Voltaire Ltd. (Voltaire), incorporated in April 1997, designs and develops server and storage switching, and software solutions that enable scale-out computing within the data center. The scale-out computing includes cluster computing, grid computing, and cloud computing. The Company's solutions allow one or more discrete computing clusters to be linked together as a single unified computing resource, or fabric. It create this unified fabric by integrating switching with dynamic management and provisioning software. Voltaire refers to its server and storage switching and software solutions as the Voltaire Scale-out Fabric (formerly known as Grid Backbone). Its management software solutions provide fabric monitoring and analysis, fabric performance optimization, and application acceleration.

The Company sells its products primarily through server original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), which incorporate its products into their solutions, as well as through resellers and systems integrators. The Company has OEM relationships with International Business Machines Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, Silicon Graphics, Inc., Sun Microsystems, Inc., and NEC Corporation. The Company's product offerings include director-class switches, multi-service switches, fixed-port configuration switches, Ethernet and fibre channel routers, application acceleration software, and scale-out management software.

Scale-Out Computing Switches

The Company’s Grid Director director-class switches and Grid Switch edge switches are used to create low latency, high-bandwidth connections of up to 40 Gigabit/second to servers and storage devices. The switch-related product offerings include its Scale-Out Fabric management software, which provides key management and performance functionality. It offers a range of switches that vary in the number of available ports and capabilities. Voltaire’s Grid Switch edge switches offers features, such as options for 10/20/40 Gigabit/second performance for clusters, grids and clouds; ultra-low latency at under 100 nanoseconds; 24 port 4x, single data rate (SDR), ports and double data rate (DDR), ports, supporting either copper or optical interfaces; 36 port 4x, DDR ports and quadruple data rate (QDR), ports, supporting either copper or optical interfaces; redundant, hot-swappable power supplies, and embedded or external grid management capabilities.

GridVision Management and Host Software

The Company offers a line of management tools that provide information on the topology of the grid, configuration of the individual switches within the grid, and real-time monitoring of performance. Its GridVision fabric management software offers summary management reports at various levels, error correlation and alarms, fabric-wide performance monitoring, and centralized port and virtual local area network configuration. These applications also provide all of the grid set-up routing algorithms and management utilities used in an InfiniBand-based computing environment.

Voltaire's GridVision Enterprise software is a grid provisioning solution, which offers customers a method of dynamically allocating resources based on pre-defined configurations. GridVision Enterprise software also delivers automated monitoring and diagnostics for servers, which enable customers to perform corrective measures and/or to shift resources to meet changing demands. Its software leverages the capabilities of InfiniBand and interfaces with its switches, as well as third-party provisioning, management, and virtualization applications.

The Company's GridStack software is a set of host drivers and protocols that enable any application to utilize the performance of random direct memory access (RDMA) and storage connectivity. Based on an open-source standard, GridStack allows both Windows and Linux-based applications to run in an InfiniBand environment. In addition, the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), emulation software incorporated into its GridStack software allows InfiniBand to appear to the user as one or more standard Internet Protocol network. Voltaire's GridBoot firmware extension enables diskless server nodes to operate over the fabric using remote storage. In 2008, the Company introduced software products, which includes Voltaire Messaging Accelerator (VMA) and Voltaire Messaging System (VMS), which are add-on libraries for application acceleration.

Voltaire's routers enable customers to consolidate InfiniBand-, Fibre Channel-, and Ethernet-based servers, network and storage connectivity into a single fabric. It offers the RB20210, an InfiniBand to 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) router, as well as SR4G, an InfiniBand to Fibre Channel storage Router. The Company's host channel adapters (HCAs) provide connectivity to InfiniBand-based grids, storage, and networking devices. Its HCAs offer dual or single d-ports, remote booting capabilities, and use its GridStack software for a variety of applications. The Company sources its HCAs from a third-party vendor and then customizes them.

The Company competes with QLogic Corporation and Cisco Systems.