Voltaire and FalconStor Partner to Bring High Performance InfiniBand Storage Solutions to the Data Center

Business Wire, Nov 15, 2006

New Solution Performance Results Reveal 800 Megabytes/Second Throughput with Commodity-Based Storage Servers

TAMPA, Fla. and BILLERICA, Mass. -- Voltaire, the worldwide leader in grid backbone solutions, in conjunction with FalconStor Software, Inc., a leading developer of network storage software, today announced that a combined InfiniBand storage solution has achieved new performance breakthroughs for networked storage. In a recent benchmark test, the Voltaire solution, powered by IPStor[R], achieved storage throughput of 800 megabytes per second and up to 80,000 I/O operations per second using Voltaire 10 Gbps InfiniBand and FalconStor's IPStor Enterprise Edition software. This gives customers the performance they need without the high cost of Fibre Channel connectivity.

"High Performance Computing environments need the performance and cost effectiveness that InfiniBand offers," said Bernie Wu, Vice President of Business Development, FalconStor Software. "We see more and more requirements for enterprise features that IPStor and Voltaire can offer in high performance computing, including scientific computing and financial markets."

Beta trials currently are underway at enterprise and high performance computing institutions worldwide. The solution will be attractive to customers looking for a high performance, lower cost alternative to Fibre Channel in environments ranging from storage for the database tier, to supporting digital rendering applications that require consistent access storage, to serving as the back end for scalable file systems.

"Our customers have an ongoing pursuit of improving performance of their business-critical applications, while lowering costs and complexity," said Asaf Somekh, vice president of strategic alliances, Voltaire. "The Voltaire solution powered by IPStor enables the doubling of storage performance while running on a unified server and storage switching backbone."

Voltaire's multi-service switching solutions leverage the iSER (iSCSI Extension for RDMA) protocol, and FalconStor's IPStor platform has been optimized for iSER to harness its advanced capabilities. iSER brings significantly greater performance to iSCSI and leverages the protocol's existing comprehensive management capabilities, allowing heterogeneous storage environments to utilize a single protocol and management infrastructure. Earlier this year, iSER over InfiniBand was ratified by the IETF and IBTA and is part of the InfiniBand specification for block storage. iSER initiator drivers are also part of the Linux 2.6.18 kernel and are included in the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) which is included in Enterprise Linux versions from Red Hat and Novell SuSE.

FalconStor's IPStor platform supports many protocols including iSCSI, and provides storage services including remote replication, accelerated backup and recovery, and fail-over services to optimize business continuity. IPStor also aggregates and provisions iSCSI disk to application hosts over an existing IP network, while offering SAN-based snapshot, delta replication and zero-impact backup and restore services. Its intelligent storage management helps ensure that critical databases and messaging systems are easily managed, reliably protected, and highly available.

"By combining iSCSI with InfiniBand instead of Ethernet, iSCSI is no longer a 'low end' solution and is a viable choice over Fibre Channel storage," said Arun Taneja, founder and senior analyst, The Taneja Group. "The solution from Voltaire powered by IPStor will be attractive to IT operations that require fast access to large amounts of storage."

The Voltaire 10 Gbps InfiniBand solution powered by IPStor will be generally available in Q1 2007. The companies will deliver solutions on 20 Gbps InfiniBand later in the year.

About Voltaire

Voltaire is the worldwide leader in grid backbone solutions for networked computing in the next generation data center. Voltaire's integrated family of switching hardware and network virtualization software delivers the high-performance, intelligent backbone for grid computing architectures. Leveraging the InfiniBand standard, Voltaire solutions offer improved performance, utilization and scalability across compute clusters, storage and IP networks. Voltaire solutions are available from major systems vendors and integrators. More information about Voltaire is available at www.voltaire.com or by calling 1-800-865-8247.

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