Mellanox Technologies has announced the SX1000-series of high-density 10 and 40GbE switches. Based on the company's recently announced, performance-leading SwitchX? switch silicon ICs, the SX-1000 series delivers up to 2.88Tb/s of switching in a single 1U device. The SX-1000 leverages Mellanox's unique IC architecture to deliver industry-leading capabilities in bandwidth performance, density, scalability, latency (230ns) and power. SX-1000 switches combined with additional peripherals, such as cables and Quad-to-Serial Adapters (QSA), allow for configurations as either 10GbE or 40GbE connections. The flexibility of server and uplink connectivity options provide improved efficiency, future proofing, and savings versus alternative 10GbE solutions.

A finalist for the 'Best of Interop' award in the data center server and storage category, Mellanox will demonstrate the 1/10/40GbE SX1036 switches, combined with the company's ConnectX-2 EN 40G Ethernet NICs and QSFP copper and fiber cables, and Unified Fabric Manager? (UFM?), showing the industry's first complete end-to-end 40GbE fabric for superior application performance and system efficiency. The combination of application performance and infrastructure optimization maximizes return-on-investment in multiple markets including Web 2.0, financial services, database, virtualized data centers, Internet and hosting, and cloud and high-performance computing.

According to Crehan Research, the 10 and 40 Gigabit Data Center Ethernet Switch market is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28 percent, from approximately $4 Billion in 2010 to over $13 Billion in 2015.

"Today's scaled out data centers for internet commerce, Web 2.0 applications, hosting and business analytics require more powerful, flexible, high density fabrics that remove bottlenecks, accelerate applications and deliver efficiency, and still meet demanding economic constraints," said John Monson, vice president of product marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "Mellanox's SX1000-series of 10 and 40GbE switches are optimized to meet these requirements with flexible configurations, a rich set of capabilities and best-in-class port density, latency, throughput and power."

When using the SX-1000 family of switches in a 1,000-node configuration, data center operators can save up to 84 percent of the power, reduce rack space by 50 percent and consolidate up to 75 percent of inter-rack cables. The higher speed 40GbE backbone overcomes common bottlenecks and network congestion caused by east/west traffic and storage, and provides up to 10x lower latencies, thus ensuring faster application performance.

SX-1000 Product Details

The SX1035 and SX1036 of 40GbE 1U switches deliver industry-leading latency performance (230us at 40GbE and 250us at 10GbE) with ultra-low power (6.5W per 40GbE port and 3.6W per 10GbE port) and offer flexible configurations such as:

• 36-port 40GbE
• 64-port 10GbE - using QSFP to four SFP+ breakout cables
• 56 10GbE and eight 40GbE - using QSFP to four SFP+ breakout cables
• 48 10GbE and 12 40GbE - using QSFP to four SFP+ breakout cables

All SX1000-series of 10 and 40GbE switches support reversed airflow adding flexibility for data centers with different thermal designs, and consist of redundant and hot-swappable fans and PSUs for higher availability. The SX1000 series is equipped with enhanced chassis management capabilities, supporting Web UI, industry-standard CLI and an impressive set of security features. The SX1000-series is also supported by Mellanox Unified Fabric Manager (UFM), which provides extensive end-to-end fabric orchestration and monitoring capabilities for virtualizing and scaling out data centers.

Availability and Pricing

The SX-1000-series of 10 and 40GbE switches will begin shipping to customers by the end of this quarter. MSRP pricing for the high density 40GbE switch is approximately $1500 per port.