INDUSTRY

LAS VEGAS, NV -- PetaSwitch Solutions, the architect of the multi-generation switch fabric, today announced the availability of the Pisces(TM) pre-silicon emulation board and unveiled its Pisces Switch Fabric. Designed from the ground up to support the ever-increasing demands of SANs, MANs and WANs, the Pisces Switch Fabric solves two major problems for equipment manufacturers and their customers: obsolescence and managing market uncertainty. "To date, the switch fabric function has found limited acceptance among system vendors," said Russell Johnson, program director for switching and routing semiconductors at RHK, a leading telecom research firm. "To address this, merchant switch fabric vendors are developing a credible scalability story and developing a level of functionality aimed at meeting a broad spectrum of applications across multiple markets." The Pisces Switch Fabric is unique in that it incorporates dual-dimension scalability, allowing for single-stage switching solutions that can scale both up in port speeds and out in the number of ports. For MAN and WAN applications, this chipset can scale from 4 to 256 ports, and from port speeds of 2.5 to 160 Gbps, resulting in an aggregate bandwidth range of 40 Gbps to 10 Tbps. For SANs, the fabric can scale up to 256 ports and port speeds of up to 40 Gbps, all while maintaining a latency level of less than 2 microseconds, regardless of the protocol. The result is a single switch fabric product that can scale from tens of gigabits per second up to terabit per second levels, without the need for expensive, time consuming redesigns or fork-lift upgrades. "At PetaSwitch, we have pooled a highly skilled team of technical specialists to pioneer a new multi-generation approach to dilemmas facing equipment manufacturers, and our resulting design sets a new standard in switch fabrics," said Dipak Shah, president and CEO of PetaSwitch Solutions. "The end customer must reduce the risk of obsolescence and increase their return on investment by adopting solutions that can evolve with their own needs and a changing industry landscape. The Pisces Switch Fabric is the catalyst that equipment manufacturers need to deliver on all fronts now, and continue to deliver in years to come." The Pisces Switch Fabric chipset consists of two highly integrated components: the Virtual Queue Manager (VQM) and the Concurrent Switch (CSW). Together, this chipset delivers new levels of scalability, reliability and availability. The design of the Pisces chipset allows switching of various packet traffic sizes and protocols, such as IP, ATM, Ethernet, MPLS, SONET and Fibre Channel. The VQM has 8 levels of dynamic virtual queuing per port with unicast, multicast and TDM queues and 32 3.125 Gbps full duplex links to the Concurrent Switch. Multiple CSWs can be combined to deliver up to 10 Tbps of aggregate bandwidth. In order to ensure that massive scalability does not sacrifice high-levels of fault tolerance, each CSW includes a scheduler and bi-directional serial links. Rather than the basic backpressure design of today's switch fabrics, the chipset supports multi-level flow control with programmable rates per level that improves the effective bandwidth of the system. It also incorporates a unique acknowledgement in the protocol, allowing it to know quickly if traffic has not been received and then automatically re-transmitting without a lengthy delay, which ensures high-availability. The Pisces pre-silicon emulation system is a single board system that allows customers to verify and demonstrate the functionality of a scaled down version of the Pisces Switch Fabric. The system is constructed using FPGAs with the capability to emulate four full duplex ports running at 10 Gbps or 2.5 Gbps (or a mixture of these two port speeds). The system is protocol agnostic and uses 4 other FPGAs on the board that function as traffic managers to generate a variety of traffic to be switched through the emulation system. There are connectors that can be utilized for traffic from external sources. For more information visit www.peta-switch.com