Thats still 2880watts per switch which is still alot of power or for the heavy duty 3456 port version thats 34560watts, sounds like a guzzeler.

Paris, because she's been guzzeling for years.

Timothy Prickett Morgan writes, "With the Vantage 8500, the machine is able to stack up a dozen of these boxes and daisy chain them together to put 3,456 ports, all running at 10 Gigabit speeds, into a single switching fabric."

Wow... the total number of ports seems oddly familiar... The marketing on the latency also seems familiar...

The total number of Voltaire Vantage ports is the exact same number of ports in the flat Infiniband switch fabric that Sun created for a single Constellation "Sun DataCenter Switch 3456"!

http://www.sun.com/products/networking/datacenter/ds3456/gallery/index.xml?p=1&s=2

Timothy Prickett Morgan writes, "Voltaire is also saying that with a latency of under 1 microsecond"

That is another interesting set of numbers... Sun identified "1 microsecond latency" in their marketing literature.

http://www.sun.com/products/networking/infiniband.jsp

Timothy Prickett Morgan writes, "Voltaire is also saying... under 10 watts of power consumption per 10GE port"

With Sun identifying "a fully populated Sun DS 3456 consumes less than 36KW under load", the per-port energy consumption of Vantage is in the same ball-park as Constellation. Clearly Voltaire was also targeting this number, as well!

http://www.sun.com/products/networking/datacenter/ds3456/features.xml

With the Sun Constellation DS 3456 being able to expand to 4x the number of nodes in a flat switched fabric over Voltaire Vantage 8500 and a port-to-port latency of 140ns for Constellation - Voltaire is not quite there yet.

Voltaire has come out with a good product, competing well with Cisco and gunning for Sun...