SANs/NAS

Mellanox to Buy Voltaire for Ethernet, InfiniBand Networking

With its acquisition bid for Voltaire, Mellanox plans to drive the development and adoption of InfiniBand for high performance computing (HPC). Voltaire brings with it several software technologies that Mellanox lacks, including a unified fabric manager and storage accelerators. Mellanox hopes to take advantage of vertical integration for creating silicon, software and hardware connectivity solutions. Sister site InfoStor has the story.

“The world of InfiniBand vendors is about to get a bit smaller thanks to the acquisition of Voltaire by Mellanox. Mellanox (NASDAQ:MLNX) will pay $8.75 per Voltaire (NASDAQ:VOLT) share in a deal valued at approximately $218 million. The deal is set to close in the first quarter of 2011.

“Both Mellanox and Voltaire have been active in the market for high-availability InfiniBand- based connectivity. In recent years both vendors have also entered into the Ethernet market as well, building technology bridges between InfinBand and Ethernet.

"‘We believe that bringing Voltaire into the Mellanox family is all about accelerating our growth and furthering the depth and breadth of our end-to-end connectivity products for both InfiniBand and Ethernet,’ Eyal Waldman, president, chairman and CEO of Mellanox said during a press conference call.

“Waldman noted during the call that the combined company will have approximately 700 employees. He added that it is his intention not to close any Voltaire facilities and he hopes that Voltaire employees will all be moving over to Mellanox.”