Solution providers find Voltaire's new high-performance switches offer a competitive advantage in the technology 'arms race.'Originally developed for use in financial services, Voltaire's high-performance switches and InfiniBand technology can
help VARs bring increased networking speed and power to customers looking for
an edge over their competition.
Voltaire's Grid Director is a
high-bandwidth, low-latency switch based on the InfiniBand standard. It can be used to create high-performance computing clusters from industry-standard hardware, says Patrick Guay, senior vice president of marketing at Voltaire.
The company
also manufactures Fibre Channel and Ethernet switches, and recently announced
Voltaire Messaging Accelerator (VMA), which improves the performance of any
application that needs high packets-per-second rates, low latency, low CPU
utilization and increased scalability, Guay says.
"Voltaire technology and the VMA has a wide-array of
uses including medical imaging systems, radar and other defense systems, as
well as for market data applications in the financial services industry,"
Guay says. Voltaire's solutions are also more readily available to VARs working
with major vendors, he adds.
"We go to market through major OEMs like IBM,
Hewlett Packard and Sun, so we now have a generally available software that any
VAR can use to improve the performance of
customers' networks," Guay says.
Logicalis is one Hewlett-Packard VAR
who's been able to do just that. Though
Logicalis as a company is considered an "IT generalist," Ed Hynes, Account Manager at Logicalis, says that using HP solutions and Voltaire's InifiniBand
standard as well as prior generations of the VMA have helped the company thrive
in financial services.
"Our customers view themselves as being in an IT arms
race; they actually use that term a lot," says Hynes. He says that in the financial market data and
hedge fund space where Logicalis plays, that customer will go to incredible
lengths to get a competitive advantage by having VARs develop unique cocktails
of technology.
Joe Skorupa, research vice president at Gartner, says
financial services firms place a premium on the shortest amount of time it
takes to execute a trade. He says the
financial upside is huge if one firm can receive, analyze and act on financial
data ahead of its competitors. That's
the beauty of the Voltaire switches and InfiniBand technology.
"The highest bandwidth, lowest latency and fastest time
to completion is key for these firms. If
they can get trade information done even just ten seconds faster than their
competitors, it make an enormous difference," Skorupa says.
"Voltaire technology is on all of our customers'
lists," says Hynes, adding that the VMA and InfiniBand technology has a
number of applications besides use in the financial services vertical, and that
Logicalis plans to go after those opportunities as well.
"We have engineers who are experts on the InfiniBand
technology, and we will take that and the VMA to market in other
verticals. There's broad applicability
here for any customer dealing with live, streaming data, multicast data or
anyone whose competetive advantage can be measured in milliseconds of
latency," he says, whether that's in the financial services industry or in
healthcare or defense.
Besides offering VMA software and Voltaire switching
hardware as part of larger networking solutions, Guay says there's huge
potential for VARs to reap integration and customization services revenue as
well.
"As much as we want these solutions to be 'out of the
box,' we understand we're dealing with some pretty complex technology. So, we're hoping VARs can make inroads with
hardware, software and gain services revenue, too," he says.
Voltaire's VMA is currently available and is
compatible with SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time from Novell, which works with
Voltaire Messaging Accelerator to reduce latency bottlenecks on both the
operating system level and in the data center, according to Novell.
Computer Networking 
