A month ago Voltaire joined the anti-Cisco front and sketched out its vision of a Scale-Out Ethernet architecture supporting what it likes to think of as "virtual mainframes" built out of industry-standard gear and making extensive use of virtualization.

Monday it started describing its first Ethernet device, the new high-density, Layer 2 core, 10 GigE switch that's key in building these data centers and clouds.

Voltaire says the Vantage 8500 is the largest (15U) non-blocking 10 gigabit Ethernet switch around and is months - if not more - ahead of any non-blocking switches from Cisco, Juniper or 3Com.

We're talking a 12-slot 11.5 Tbps chassis with a peak slot capacity of 960 Gbps here.

Vantage is targeting Cisco's vaunted Nexus 7000 switches - which have so far missed the non-blocking boat - with 3x more capacity and 20x less latency, running at a third the power for half the cost and based on open standards, not Cisco's proprietary notions.

The widget, which leverages characteristics of InfiniBand, Voltaire's signature skill, is meant to deal with the spike in traffic that virtualization creates.

According to Voltaire marketing VP Asaf Somekh, there's so much traffic created that virtualization overwhelms the old oversubscribed switches traditionally used in LANs, causing delays, losing data and basically making a hash of any service-level agreements (SLAs).

Voltaire's network architecture is supposed to improve I/O bandwidth while eliminating the whole aggregation switching tier and collapsing cost along with it. Flatter means more scalable and energy-efficient, the company says.

The Vantage 8500 promises dynamic traffic and congestion detection - not just management - complements of increased fabric utilization, true lossless behavior and extensive monitoring -resulting in predictable, consistent 10 Gb/s throughput through all of its 288 ports.

Virtual machines should work properly without the network being over-provisioned.

According to Gartner, the move to a two-tier network architecture - top of the rack and core - mandates large-capacity non-blocking 10 GigE core switches that support Layer 2 mesh networks with thousands of ports.

Well, 12 of the Vantage 8500 switches connected together can support up to 3,400 servers. Voltaire says this translates into a linearly scalable data center fabric that maintains the same price per port no matter how many hundreds or thousands of servers are involved.

Voltaire can partition its Vantage ports into multiple independent virtual ports (VIPOs) that can be provisioned, monitored and mirrored like physical ports. And fabric virtualization can partition the switch into virtual data centers of physical and virtual servers, with isolated virtual I/O to storage and network resources.

As you might expect, servers can dynamically change and move around while policy, high available and SLA are maintained and user access can be restricted to a virtual data center.

The thing supports x86 servers, third-party switches and leading management and virtualization solutions. It's operable with both 1 GigE and 20 GigE adapters for easy integration with existing data centers and mixed environments. And it's supposed to have less than one microsecond latency while consuming 10W per port.

The company says these specs deliver 10x lower latency and 4x faster core performance for half the price using 3x less power than you-know-who, a difference that can translate into millions of dollars saved.

Somekh says the problem with other 10 GbE devices is dicey scaling, compensated for by over-provisioning and expensive, hierarchical configurations - typical of Cisco - that don't make good business sense and lead to lock-in.

And that's if they're available. Many of them aren't expected until 2011. The Vantage 8500 is due in the second half and should list for $1,200 per port.

Down the road Voltaire expects to turn out denser switches with 432 and 576 ports.

Its current line card options include 24-port 10 GbE SFP+ non-blocking and 36-port 10 GbE SFP+; with 20-port 10 GbE plus eight-port Fibre Channel coming next year.

HP and IBM are cozying up to Voltaire in opposition to Cisco as part of the ecosystem forming around its scale-out Ethernet.