10 Gigabit/Second InfiniBand Solution Will Bring Superior Performance to Blade Platform and Drive Blade Adoption for Grids; Voltaire Joins Blade.org Community

BILLERICA, Mass. – February 8, 2006 – Voltaire, the worldwide leader in grid backbone solutions, today announced a high-speed interconnect solution for IBM BladeCenter-H, the new blade solution introduced today by IBM. The Voltaire solution for IBM BladeCenter-H will include 10 Gigabits per second Gbps (4X) InfiniBand products to deliver industry-leading performance and virtualization capabilities to clusters and grids in high-performance computing and commercial enterprise environments. The powerful combination of industry-standard blade and InfiniBand technologies makes the solution ideal for scaling out grid computing architectures.

IBM, the world's number one server provider, has led the blade server market for nine consecutive quarters with a 42% marketshare, according to IDC. IBM also has led the overall server market for 10 straight quarters.

“IBM is pleased to have Voltaire as an open specification partner and Blade.Org member,” said Juhi Jotwani, Director of IBM BladeCenter and xSeries Solutions. “It allows us to offer clients the choice of an open, high-bandwidth, low-latency platform to scale out their computing environments.”

Voltaire is leveraging the open specifications of IBM’s BladeCenter-H platform to design and bring to market a 4X InfiniBand host channel adapter (HCA) and switch module.

“We are extremely pleased to strengthen our existing partnership with IBM to extend the value of blades to higher performance computing environments and grid architectures,” said Patrick Guay, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. “The combination of IBM blade servers and 10 Gigabit per second InfiniBand-based switching, allows businesses in a broad range of industries to achieve levels of price-performance that surpass those of any other 10 Gigabit technology.”

Voltaire Joins Blade.org

Voltaire also announced that it has joined the Blade.org community. Blade.org is an industry community and collaborative organization focused on accelerating the expansion of solutions for BladeCenter. The organization is aimed at spurring development and innovation around blade technology and enables BladeCenter ecosystem partners to test and interoperate their products on BladeCenter. As an active member, Voltaire plans to leverage the community’s resources to expedite development and adoption of the new solutions.

“The valued addition of Voltaire as a member of Blade.org underscores our mutual goal to gather the brightest minds in an open development environment to create interoperable technologies that meet the needs of customers in all industries,” said Doug Balog, chairman, Blade.org. “BladeCenter continues to set the industry agenda and today, that agenda is now a collaborative one shared with the ever expanding members of Blade.org.”

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 http://www.voltaire.com or by calling 1-800-865-8247.