Voltaire, the recent 10 gigE recruit, is assembling a little army of supporters to help it take a right old swing at Cisco.

So far the pack includes IBM and HP, both of which have a bone to pick with Cisco since Cisco turned server purveyor; Intel, which like O’Reilly’s dog will go a bit of the way with anybody; Red Hat, Platform Computing, NetApp, Mellanox, Fulcrum Microsystems, Cluster Resources, Chelsio Communications, NYSE Technologies and Blade Network Technologies as well as Cisco familiar VMware, which has got a touch of O’Reilly dog in it too.

This ecosystem is supposed to accelerate adoption of low-latency scale-out Ethernet fabrics for enterprise data centers and cloud computing environments.

Voltaire’s dog in the fight is of course its newfangled Vantage 8500 Ethernet switches, which are supposed to go GA by the end of the year.

Voltaire’s approach flattens the expensive hierarchical switching tiers of a Cisco-based configuration that it calls “outdated,” “lacking in innovation” and a pathway to vendor lock-in.

Its Vantage Ethernet switches are based on Layer 2 core converged enhanced Ethernet (CEE) technology that’s supposed to turn out a far more scalable, lower latency and virtualized 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabric, with lower costs, power consumption and simplified management.

Its budding ecosystem should be able to deliver an end-to-end seamless solution.

Voltaire is a little wisp of a thing compared to Cisco. Its revenues for the June quarter totaled all of $10.7 million, compared to $17.1 million this time last year and worked out to a net loss of $2.9 million, or 14 cents a share, compared to net income of $400,000, or two cents a share in 2008. But Q2 was better than Q1 and the second half is looking better again, the company said Thursday.

The Vantage 8500 is supposed to open the door to new markets that increase the company’s addressable market from InfiniBand’s hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars.

By the way, IBM last week under cover of cloud computing picked up Juniper Networks whose networking gear it’ll sell under its own name, a poke in the eye to Cisco.