Voltaire on Tuesday introduced a 40 gigabit per second switch for bridging traffic between Ethernet-based networks.

The Voltaire Grid Director 4036E, which has a built-in, low-latency gateway, is aimed at trading businesses with high transaction volumes. The product features 34 40 Gb/s InfiniBand ports, which collectively deliver 2.72 terabits per second.

The 4036E has less than 100 nanoseconds of port-to-port latency and two 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports that bridge traffic in less than two microseconds, according to Voltaire. The 1U device includes an InfiniBand switch, an embedded subnet manager, and a built-in, hardware-based, low-latency Ethernet gateway.

Besides trading institutions, the 4036E is aimed at financial services that depend on market data feeds. For greater latency reduction, Voltaire offers its own messaging acceleration software.

Another use for the product is in high-performance, 10 Gigabit Ethernet storage environments found in industries ranging from energy to manufacturing and life sciences. The device can also be used in clustered or scale-out databases.

The Grid Director 4036E is set for availability late in the current quarter. Pricing was not disclosed.

Voltaire designed last year a 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switch module for IBM BladeCenter server chassis. The switch improved performance for virtualization, large-scale data warehouses and ERP applications, and high-performance computing.

Voltaire technology has been used in IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer, which was ranked the world's fastest computer in the biannual Top500 list in November 2008.

IBM in October 2008 released the switch specifications for BladeCenter server chassis on a royalty-free basis. By making the technology available, IBM hoped to encourage switch vendors to build products for the system.

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