Using FocalPoint in the Enterprise
With new trends in the enterprise such as the outsourcing of compute and storage resources to the 'cloud', network access bandwidth becomes a critical factor in overall productivity. This access bandwidth must also be cost and area efficient in order to meet tight enterprise budget constraints. FocalPoint enables the highest density enterprise access and aggregation solutions in the industry, while providing system developers with complete reference design packages, software and support, allowing them to enter the market quickly.
Access
As applications utilizing advanced graphics become common, and computational resources are moved to the data center or to the "cloud", 1GbE bandwidth to the desktop is becoming standard. In addition, remote storage technologies such as iSCSI can achieve performance improvements if packet losses are minimized throughout the enterprise fabric. FocalPoint enables the development 1GbE switches with high port density while providing advanced features such as L3 routing, traffic classification, lossless operation and efficient load distribution to backbone switches.
Fulcrum provides a reference platform called Vegas, that can be used to evaluate the performance and flexibility of the FocalPoint FM2112 switch and FM4112 router, and can also be used as the basis for the rapid development of performance-leading 1G Ethernet access platforms. The reference design platform contains 48 1000BaseT ports and up to 8 10G SFP+ ports in a 1U rack-mountable chassis, and can be ordered with software installed and ready to run.
Aggregation
In the enterprise, traffic from the access switches must be connected to the enterprise data center backbone switches and then aggregated into the provider network. With 1GbE to the desktop becoming common, 10GbE in the aggregation and backbone switches is required. In order to minimize cost and power of these 10GbE switches, high density, low-cost designs with efficient bandwidth utilization are critical. FocalPoint can provide up to 24-ports of 10GbE on a single chip and these chips can be efficiently stacked or configured as fat trees with up to 48 10GbE ports in a non-blocking 1U chassis. This solution is more cost efficient, power efficient and space efficient that traditional 10GbE switches while providing at least twice the performance.
Fulcrum provides a reference platform called Monaco that can be used to evaluate the performance and flexibility of the FocalPoint FM4224 switch/router, either in a test environment or a live data center network. The platform contains 24 SFP+ interfaces in a 1U rack-mountable chassis, and can be ordered with software installed and ready to run. SFP+ allows various low-cost cabling options to be used such as SR and LR optics or copper twin-ax. With four Monaco backbone switches, up to 20 Vegas access switches can be connected, providing 960 1GbE network ports and 16 10GbE uplink ports as shown in the figure below. Data can be efficiently distributed across the Monaco switches using advanced FocalPoint load balancing features and FocalPoint management software can treat the entire system as a single virtual fabric which can minimize the need for additional software development.
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