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Friday, June 12, 2009
Voltaire targets Cisco, data centers with 10Gbps switch
By Efrain Viscarolasaga
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With a move into pure Ethernet switching, Billerica-based gigabit switch maker Voltaire Ltd. is tackling a new, larger market, while also setting its sights on one of the industry’s largest players.
Voltaire’s new switch, the Vantage 8500, is the company’s first pure-play Ethernet switch, aimed at interconnecting servers in large commercial data centers. The box can run 288 10 gigabit per second Ethernet streams, with a scale-out stacking option that can get a single unit to 3,400 ports, making it one of the most dense 10-gig switches on the market, analysts say.
For a company built on the much higher bit-rate Infiniband protocol, which offers 40 Gbps speeds for high-performance computing environments (such as science research), the move to gigabit Ethernet opens a much wider market, providing Layer 2 communications among servers in large data centers.
That market is growing — the California-based Dell’Oro Group Inc. declared the more than $2 billion 10 gigabit Ethernet market the only Ethernet switching market segment expected to see year-over-year revenue growth in 2009. But it is also home to a number of large players, including Cisco Systems Inc. of California, which boasts the majority of the data center Ethernet switching market.
But according to Asaf Somekh, Voltaire’s vice president of marketing, Cisco’s recent announcement that it will be entering the server market, has created an opportunity for Voltaire. Cisco’s traditional Ethernet switch customers such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp. are now competitors of Cisco in the server market, and that has created some tension, and a product vacuum Voltaire hopes to fill.
“The business dynamics, product dynamics and market conditions have created an opportunity for innovation,” said Somekh. “I think we are in the right place to be small enough to innovate and large enough to maintain the critical mass to take advantage of it.”
Joe Skorupa, a research vice president for Gartner Inc., agreed with Voltaire’s view of innovation, saying that there is indeed a need for the company’s new switch and highlighting that while Cisco has been working on a similar functioning product for two years, Voltaire has seemingly beaten the Goliath to the punch.
However, Skorupa pointed out that while Cisco’s move to the server market may have ruffled some feathers, its products still have a well-established distribution channel, and that is something a smaller company like Voltaire needs to overcome to be successful.
“Assuming the product (the Vantage 8500) exits beta tests and does everything it is expected to do, (Voltaire) should have a great product,” he said. “But the question will be, do they have the channels to sustain the very large customers?”
While Voltaire does not yet have those relationships in the data center switching space as yet, Somekh points out his company does have long standing relationships with many of its target customers through its Infiniband offerings, which the company continues to develop.
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