Voltaire has come out with a new top-of-rack switch, a low-latency, high-density 10 GbE switch for virtualization and scaling cloud networks that will be a challenge for Cisco since Cisco doesn't have anything like it and Voltaire's pricing the thing aggressively to capitalize on its advantage.

It's not just an issue for Cisco's switch business. Voltaire OEMs to Cisco's server rivals, HP and IBM, so if the dingus is as jazzy as Voltaire says it is, it could create a speed bump for Cisco's data center ambitions.

It's a 48-port widget in a little 1U device, providing non-blocking switching throughput of 960 Gbps at the industry's lowest power consumption - 6.3 watts/port.

The device is smaller than the company's flagship 288-port 8500 Layer 2 switch, but is capable of supporting 200 to 240 servers and thousands of virtual machines, say 4,000 or so. Combined with the 8500 as a site grows, the new Vantage 6048 can build out flat data center fabrics of more than 3,400 10 gigabit Ethernet ports with non-blocking, lossless switch fabric capacity of 69.12 terabits a second. (In a blocking configuration the numbers could work out to 6,000 or more.)

Voltaire's VMware-aware Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) software orchestrates the fabric to look like a single logical switch to the network, enforcing fabric-wide service policies, providing real-time fabric flow level monitoring, and simplifying fabric administration across physical and virtual switching elements.

The software will also orchestrate virtual machine connectivity persistence so each VM's traffic flow is shaped, rate-limited and policied throughout the fabric. VM connections can be moved around without human intervention, according to marketing VP Asaf Somekh.

The switch is supposed to have more CEE-compliant features than any other switch around, stuff like Congestion Notification (IEEE 802.1Qau) to assure end-to-end congestion management and isolation between applications that co-exist in the data center.

The 6048 will go for under $24,000 list, less than $500 a port, when it comes to market in October, Asaf said.

The company was showing it around at VMworld this week and telling people that using the 6048 in combination with UFM offers businesses relying on cloud architectures a standard-based, modular infrastructure that can scale linearly from a single server rack to 100s of racks with the same hardware and software building blocks.