FortiSwitch-1000 Designed for Supercomputing and Cloud Computing Applications; Leverages Low Latency of FocalPoint to Scale to up to Thousands of Nodes

Fulcrum Microsystems today announced that its industry-leading low-latency FocalPoint silicon is being used by Fortinet as the switching fabric for the company’s recently launched FortiSwitch-1000 chassis-based switching platform. Fortinet is a leading network security provider and worldwide leader of unified threat management (UTM) solutions.

The FortiSwitch-1000 10 GbE platform is designed to build high-performance network fabrics such as those required by supercomputers for calculation-intensive tasks or high-speed interconnect applications, including server virtualization, data center consolidation, and parallel and cloud-based computing. With a high port-density of up to 576 10 GbE interfaces per seven-foot rack, the new FortiSwitch-1000 switch can scale to more than a thousand non-blocking ports, enabling maximum performance in minimal data center square footage.

The fabric inside the FortiSwitch-1000 platform is based on Fulcrum’s industry-leading FocalPoint FM4224, a 24-port 10GE switch that features full throughput on all ports, the industry’s lowest latency (200 ns at layer 2), and data center bridging features necessary to transform 10GE into the converged fabric for storage, clustering and data communications in the data center. FocalPoint also provides unparalleled fabric scalability with advanced features to support non-blocking fat tree architectures as demonstrated in the FortiSwitch-1000.

“The FortiSwitch-1000 platform gives our customers the flexibility to build Ethernet networks that can interconnect thousands of server nodes and storage drives, or build very large supercomputing and cloud computing interconnect networks,” said Marshall Bartoszek, senior director of data center strategy, Fortinet. “One of the keys to this 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.”

“Fortinet’s new switch family demonstrates how Ethernet-based fat tree network architectures can provide non blocking fabrics for even the largest data centers at a much lower cost than other fabrics,” said Mike Zeile, Fulcrum Microsystems president and COO. “The FortSwitch-1000 application is one of more than 40 design wins for Fulcrum in 2009, all of which have cemented FocalPoint’s place in the industry as the performance leader for data center Ethernet switching.”