Fulcrum Microsystems Blog

Tom Vanderbilt, in a New York Times article, speculates what it would take to support certain large-scale cloud computing environments — such as Microsoft’s on-line gaming community and Facebook’s on-line relationship management community.  The requirements, and the implied network architecture challenges, are staggering.  Are “information substations” in our future?

Read the article…

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Perhaps one of the more compelling examples of the importance of low latency in the data center came today in the form of a joint announcement between Juniper Networks and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), where NYSE outlined plans for two new state-of-the-art transaction processing data centers.  According to the announcement, NYSE is seeking to achieve 50uS internal roundtrip latency which will vastly improve transaction processing efficiency and volume and lead to a strategic advantage.

Read some of the articles and analyses in NetworkWorld, The Register, and CIO.

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

A recent analysis by Cisco suggests that all forms of video will exceed 90% of consumer IP traffic by 2013.

This will require a shift in how vendors optimize their systems as new metrics such as multicast bandwidth and video distribution performance become important. It also requires switch silicon that can meet these new requirements. Full bandwidth multicast can only be achieved with efficent switch arcitectures that eliminate the internal blocking found in traditional switch designs. In addition, the new low latency switches developed for the data center help reduce multicast jitter, minimizing the need for video buffering. Because of this, FocalPoint 10GbE switches have become a required component in many new video distribution systems that have been designed to address these new market requirements.

Comments are welcome: feedback@fulcrummicro.com

Our friends at Voltaire took the wraps off their new Vantage 8500 Ethernet switch for scale-out data centers and cloud computing fabrics.  The Vantage 8500 platform supports up to 288 10GbE ports in a single modular chassis, with the ability to scale to more than 3,400 non-blocking ports in a distributed layer-2 multi-pathed fabric.

Read more in Byte and Switch or in NetworkWorld.

Comments are welcome: feedback@fulcrummicro.com

In her most recent blog entry, Jayshree Ullal of Arista Networks discusses the importance of low latency for cloud networking and identifies the key contributors to latency in a full-scale system.  Among her observations, Jayshree reminisces about the early days of networking and the debate between “cut-through” and “store-and-forward” switch architectures.

I recall the raging arguments in the prior decade about implementation of Ethernet switches and the discussions on “cut through” versus “store and forward”. The issues centered on the deploying older store & forward techniques for preservation of packet integrity versus latency improvements with cut-through. Latency was less of an issue back then since application flows were kilobyte class (with email and file transfers) and network speeds were only 100 megabits transitioning to 1 gigabit Ethernet. Typical network latencies tolerated here were 100 to 1000 microseconds and most classic enterprise networks are still built that way with many hops across three tiers of oversubscribed networks.

Low-latency cut-through architectures have become a key requirement for building scalable data center fabrics, and we’re pleased to offer the industry’s lowest 10GbE latency performance with the only switches that support a cut-through mode of operation.  (Our FocalPoint devices also support store-and-forward operation, configurable on a per-port-pair basis.  However, virtually everyone uses the devices in cut-through mode to take advantage of the low latency.)

Read Jayshree’s blog…

Comments are welcome: feedback@fulcrummicro.com