STORAGE

Voltaire and FalconStor Software today announced the optimization of their solutions to deliver high performance native InfiniBand storage solutions. Customers leveraging FalconStor's IPStor Enterprise Edition software with Voltaire Grid Backbone switching solutions can implement an ultra high performance storage network operating at speeds that are four times faster than Fibre Channel. Voltaire is the industry's only provider of solutions that enable iSCSI over InfiniBand. Voltaire's multi-service switching solutions leverage the iSER (iSCSI RDMA) protocol, and FalconStor's IPStor software 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. iSER over 10 Gbps InfiniBand delivers markedly better performance than Fibre Channel at significantly lower costs. Massachusetts-based Institute for Health Metrics (IHM) is employing the Voltaire and FalconStor solutions to provide information products for hospitals using continuous streams of clinical data. "By moving to native InfiniBand storage, we've essentially built a 'Fibre Channel-free' data center to run a highly complex, storage-intensive application," said Don Pettini, Chief Technology and Information Security Officer, IHM. "The Voltaire and FalconStor solutions combine iSCSI's management capabilities with the high performance of InfiniBand, enabling us to accelerate backups and data replication for our most important applications." For their server and storage environment, the Institute selected Oracle 10g RAC data warehouse applications servers all running IPStor software over Voltaire InfiniBand. Using InfiniBand, IHM is able to make its large databases available at speeds that are four times faster than Fibre Channel. "FalconStor recognizes the real world business advantages associated with InfiniBand," said Bernie Wu, FalconStor vice president of business development. "Leveraging Voltaire's 10 Gbps InfiniBand-based switching solutions with IPStor software provides our mutual customers with new levels of performance that can reduce the overall complexities and costs associated with a dynamic storage environment." IPStor software 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 software 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. "We are very pleased to be able to offer customers a solution based on the collaborative efforts of FalconStor, a data protection leader, and Voltaire, a leader in both InfiniBand and network virtualization," said Patrick Guay, vice president of marketing, Voltaire. "This innovative combination will be attractive to customers seeking to bring unprecedented performance to their storage environments and is poised to accelerate iSCSI adoption in the enterprise data center." The Voltaire and FalconStor solutions are available from storage OEMs, storage solution integrators and end users in Q4 2005.