INDUSTRY

New 40-port line card supports 560 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a single chassis

Force10 Networks today announced the availability of a new line-card for its ExaScale virtualized core switch/router platform, setting a new benchmark for 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) port density, and giving the company overall industry leadership.

Force10’s new 40-port line-card increases the density of the ExaScale E1200 virtualized core switch/router to 560 10 GbE ports in a single half-rack chassis – a new industry record.  The model provides industry leadership for the ExaScale in both line-rate and oversubscribed 10 GbE ports, ensuring customers can support high density connectivity as well as true non-blocking operations where required.  Force10’s 40-port 10 GbE line-card can aggregate more devices per card, ultimately leaving more chassis space available for future growth while also allowing IT architects to reduce the complexity of the network.

A recently released market research report from Dell'Oro Group indicated that 10 GbE was the only segment within the Ethernet Switch market to show sequential port and revenue growth in 2009. Dell’Oro also noted that the majority of market revenue growth in 2010 also is forecast to come from 10 GbE products.

Thought Leaders Acknowledge Force10’s 10 GbE Leadership
Industry analysts recognize that this increased density – coupled with the unmatched performance, resiliency and low power consumption of Force10’s ExaScale platform – demonstrates the company’s commitment to maintaining clear industry leadership among the requirements that matter most to next-generation data center managers.

“In less than one year, Force10 has outpaced market leaders such as Cisco Systems in delivering a robust and industry-leading density core switch/router platform with a wide range of line-card interfaces and performance characteristics,” says Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president, Yankee Group.  “Customers need a broad interface and line-card portfolio to balance cost-effectiveness with performance and scale in data center networks.”

“Force10’s timely introduction of its 40-port 10 GbE line card illustrates its focused attention to the development of the data center market,” says Steve Steinke, senior analyst for enterprise networks, The 451 Group.  “The core switch/router platform with the newly expanded line-card portfolio is the key to providing what customers need to maintain high performing, scalable data center networks.”

New Line Cards Contribute to Purpose-Built Architecture
With the highest port density to date, Force10’s 40-port 10 GbE line card is the latest solution based on the ExaScale suite of advanced, packet processing and switching ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) that leverage Force10’s high performance hardware and software design knowledge, patented backplane technology, and industry-leading performance, reliability and flexibility. 

“When evaluating network infrastructure solutions, we have always considered the density and performance numbers provided by most vendors to be ‘perfect world’ scenarios that are rarely realized after deployment,” said John Lowell Wofford, manager of HPCC at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Columbia University Medical Center. “However, as a Force10 customer, we’ve seen first-hand how their claims are consistently backed up by the performance of their solutions.  We anticipate these new 40-port 10 GbE line cards will merit our serious consideration to cost-effectively build and maintain our data center.”

“Performance requirements and densities for cluster computing are advancing at unprecedented rates to meet the need of government research and education communities,” said Parks Fields, manager, Scalable Systems Engineering, Los Alamos National Lab.  “High performance computing environments call for density, performance and reliability in the smallest energy-efficient footprint possible.  Force10 Networks continues to offer leadership in this area.  The ability to support 560 ports of 10 GbE at high levels of performance and stability in a small eco-efficient footprint is a capability we require now and will need more for the next generation of “Cluster Computing” that we are considering,” he said.

ExaScale Platform Excellence
The company’s enhanced port density will enable Force10’s partners to provide customers with significant operational value, enabling each organization to effectively balance its performance and cost targets.

“Port density and throughput performance are critical success factors in the high performance storage market,” said Don Grabski, director of product management at Panasas Systems, Inc. “With our ActiveStor family of integrated storage solutions and systems approach to performance, Panasas optimizes performance for all application workloads while reducing storage management complexity and costs.  Force10 has been an excellent technology partner that helps Panasas deliver highly scalable network attached storage solutions for the world’s most data-intensive applications, achieving speeds up to 55 GB/second in bandwidth performance.”

Leveraging the Force10 Virtualization Framework
Force10’s Ethernet products incorporate the Force10 Virtualization Framework technology suite, which enables data centres and service providers to build, manage and automate network and application performance and processes.

Pricing and Availability
Pricing for the 40-port 10 GbE line-card starts at $97,500. The product will begin shipping in the 2nd quarter of 2010.