Voltaire’s thinking Cisco got way too cute elbowing its way into the server market and will be forced to sacrifice “big bear-sized bites” of its networking share as a result – a conclusion many share but Voltaire expects to prove today when it says IBM is running with its newfangled Vantage 8500 non-blocking high-performance, high-density 10 gigabit Ethernet switch to scale out data centers.

See, OEMs are not the usual channel for such things – they’re usually sold direct or through resellers – so it’s an uncoded message that IBM is, well, um, pissed at Cisco.

The message comes wrapped in Voltaire’s announcement that the widget has finally gone GA and is available for clouds, virtualized data centers and plain ole scale-out. It’s supposed to bring scalability and efficiency to data center networking at half the price.

HP is probably up next but for the moment the doohickey’s going into IBM BladeCenters, iDataPlexes and rack-mount servers.

The Vantage 8500 is a Layer 2 core switch. Besides its other tricks it’s also supposed to reduce infrastructure costs even further. It’s got less than a microsecond’s latency, low 10W-per-port power consumption at low-per-port costs for what its maker says is the lowest solution cost, power consumption and latency on the market.

Voltaire says a customer building a 1,000-node data center fabric with the thing can expect 10x lower latency and 4x faster core performance for half the price, using 3x the power of alternative solutions.

And it’s not supposed to add tiers or oversubscribe the network, Gartner says.

The Vantage 8500 can enable simplified, flat, scale-out fabrics. By clustering up to 12 Vantage 8500 switches together, Voltaire says a customer can expand a data center to thousands of servers while preserving efficiency and price-per-port, without degrading the performance or latency like traditional hierarchical network designs

Voltaire marketing VP Asaf Somekh (pictured above) gushes, “This switch puts an end to the era of the over-provisioned network.”

The Vantage 8500 features 288 wire speed, 10 gigE ports in a 15U chassis, which makes it the world’s biggest non-blocking Ethernet data center switch.

It’s based on the newfangled converged enhanced Ethernet (CEE) technology to provide InfiniBand-like capabilities such as a lossless switching fabric, multi-pathing, virtualization, fabric-wide congestion management and QoS.

The dingus supports industry standard servers, third-party switches and your usual management and virtualization solutions. It’s interoperable with both 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet solutions to integrate with existing data centers and mixed environments and it’s got software-based capabilities to address virtualized and converged data center environments