Fulcrum Microsystems Blog

By: Gary Lee

As talk about 40G and 100G Ethernet networks starts to turn to action, one of the key design issues is the SerDes. Today’s 10Gbps SerDes won’t scale to 40G (much less 100G) as the port bandwidth requirements are scaling much faster than the process node shrinks. Groups of higher speed SerDes are the answer, but speeds above 25Gbps challenge the limits of physics at any reasonable distance.

At the recent OFC/NFOEC show, Avago demonstrated its promising MicroPods optical technology that easily integrates onto a PC board and provides dense optical connectivity with line rates of 12.5G. While other SerDes solutions offer this data rate, this is the first off-chip solution to enable 12.5G chip-to-chip connections and link multiple switches. Avago’s MicroPods could potentially pave the way for the serial rates of the interconnection of systems to keep pace with the chip-to-chip SerDes speeds.

While this is an important first step in the mass migration to next-generation Ethernet connections, even this will not be enough to take the industry to 100G Ethernet, due to the large number of channels required. The ideal solution, is a 25Gbps SerDes, which meets the 100G bandwidth requirement with only four channels. We are looking forward to evaluating MicroPods for 40G designs and watching the 28nm SerDes tecnology for the next generation solution for 100G Ethernet.

Comments welcome: feedback@fulcrummicro.com

You might have seen the news this week that Fortinet® has chosen FocalPoint silicon for its recently announced FortiSwitch-1000 chassis-based switching platform.  Fortinet is a leading network security provider and worldwide leader of unified threat management (UTM) solutions.  As Fortinet Senior Director of Data Center Strategy Marshall Bartoszek observed:

“One of the keys to this [new switch family] is the FocalPoint architecture, which provides high performance at the core of our architecture and powers the vScale congestion-avoidance features that give our switches a distinct, low latency competitive advantage.”

The FortiSwitch-1000 is another example of a FocalPoint-enabled fat tree network architecture providing non-blocking Ethernet fabrics for even the largest data centers.  Data Center Bridging features built into FocalPoint provide the FortiSwitch family a silicon solution that enables the high-performance network fabrics required by data centers for latency sensitive tasks and high-speed interconnect applications, including server virtualization, data center consolidation and cloud-based computing.

Read the full release here…

Comments welcome: feedback@fulcrummicro.com

The ongoing collaboration between vendors that are positioning data center solutions against Cisco continues with the recent OEM deal between Dell and Juniper, in which Dell will be able to offer Juniper products to its data center customers. This article from Network World also mentions that Dell had reached a similar OEM agreement with Brocade for its SAN and Foundry LAN switches.

The two partnerships are indicative of the overall industry trend where server vendors are working with switch vendors to challenge the Cisco-driven data center paradigm. While the article does not directly confirm that these partnerships are a direct result of Juniper’s Project Stratus initiative, it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. Server vendors recognize the need for switching architectures to be scalable and feature-rich in order to provide efficient solutions for a cloud-ready data center. This is in contrast to Cisco who proposes a less efficient tiered data center fabric solution.

Read the Network World article…

Comments are welcome: feedback@fulcrummicro.com

Today our partner Green Hills Software announced support for Freescale’s VortiQa software for networking equipment, running on Fulcrum’s FocalPoint switch silicon and reference platforms. The combination of Fulcrum’s low latency, lossless 10GbE switch silicon, Green Hill’s secure operating system and Freescale’s processor and VortiQa software, provide an ideal solution for data center security.

Comments are welcome: feedback@fulcrummicro.com

Cavium took the wraps off its much-anticipated Octeon II Multicore MIPS64 Processor Family in unique fashion, with a partner-supported product launch.  With several customers in common and a new processor family that perfectly complements our FocalPoint Ethernet switches, Fulcrum was pleased to participate.  Rajiv Khemani, VP and GM of Cavium’s Networking and Communications Division commented about the partnership:

Cavium is pleased to be partnering with Fulcrum to enable next-generation networking platforms.  The high performance of Fulcrum’s FocalPoint lossless Ethernet fabrics combined with the high programmability provided by the Cavium OCTEON II Processors enables networking equipment providers to deliver differentiated and extensible platforms that are suitable for the most demanding data center, cloud networking, and broadband access applications.

Read the press release…

Comments are welcome: feedback@fulcrummicro.com