Oct. 20, 2009 (Business Wire) -- Voltaire Ltd. (NASDAQ: VOLT), a leading provider of scale-out data center fabrics, today announced the general availability of the Vantage™ 8500 switch, a high-performance, high-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch for scale-out data centers and cloud computing.

The Voltaire Vantage 8500 is a Layer 2 core switch that addresses the key networking requirements of virtualized, scale-out data centers including efficiency, scalability, and performance, at significantly lower costs. It also enables consolidation of network tiers to reduce infrastructure expenses even further. The Vantage 8500 features less than 1 microsecond latency, low 10 watts per port power consumption at low per port costs delivering unmatched scalability with the lowest solution cost, power consumption, and latency on the market.

For a customer building a 1000 node data center fabric with Voltaire Vantage 8500 switches, this delivers 10X lower latency and 4X faster core performance for half the price, using 3X less power than alternative solutions.

“The performance, efficiency and low cost requirements of large-scale data centers is driving the need for new network architectures that offer improved I/O bandwidth without adding extra tiers and oversubscription to the network,” said Joe Skorupa, Research VP, Gartner. “State of the art, two-tier data center networks must scale from hundreds to a few thousand core ports, driving the requirement for high capacity, non-blocking 10 Gigabit Ethernet core switches.”

The Voltaire Vantage 8500 has a unique capability to enable simplified, flat, scale-out fabrics. By clustering up to twelve Vantage 8500 switches together, a customer can expand their data center to many thousands of servers while preserving the same efficiency and price-per-port, without degrading the performance or latency like traditional hierarchical network designs.

“The ability to deliver predictable, consistent 10 Gb/s throughput is important for the new virtualized data center. These data centers are running at high utilization rates serving many applications and cannot afford disruptions in service,” said Asaf Somekh, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. “Our new Vantage 8500 is a high capacity, Layer 2 core switch that enables a simplified, ‘flat’ data center network that efficiently delivers reliable performance.”

“This switch puts an end to the era of the over-provisioned network,” Somekh added.

The Voltaire Vantage 8500 features 288 wire speed, 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a 15U high chassis making it the world’s largest non-blocking Ethernet data center switch.