SCIENCE

Aquantia and Fulcrum Microsystems has announced that they have jointly developed a 48-port 10GBASE-T switch reference design platform to enable the mainstream adoption of high-density Top-of-Rack and End-of-Row switches. The platform will feature Aquantia's market leading 40nm quad PHY technology and Fulcrum's high performance FM6000 switch architecture. The platform will debut in Fulcrum booth 4229 at the SC10 conference, November 15-18, 2010, in New Orleans, La.

Code-named Amsterdam, the Aquantia-Fulcrum reference platform is based on the industry-leading Fulcrum FocalPoint FM6364 switch and Aquantia quad-port 10GBASE-T PHY chips. The complete single-board reference platform can be used to quickly and exhaustively evaluate the high performance and features of the bundled solution in a test environment or a live datacenter network. The platform has 48 10GBASE-T ports with high-density integrated 2x4 magnetics. It also features four 40G Ethernet ports for uplinks in the industry-standard QSFP form factor. It is designed in a standard 1U rack-mountable chassis and can be ordered with the Fulcrum software installed and ready to run.

The Amsterdam platform comes at a critical juncture in the industry when density of 10G Ethernet ports in server racks is expected to grow dramatically as 10GBASE-T LAN-on-Motherboard (LOM) becomes available in the middle of next year. The advent of 10GBASE-T in LOM, with typical configurations of 2 ports per 1 RU server, triggers the need for densities of 48 ports or higher in switches deployed in both Top-of-Rack and End-of-Row implementations. The reference platform is targeted at both server and switch OEMs as well as large datacenter systems managers. It lets users accomplish the following:

• Accelerate hardware development by leveraging the design of the platform to kick-start a custom design. Design files and documentation are available to assist the hardware designer in getting to market quickly.
  
• Accelerate software development by leveraging the full-featured platform for software design and test -- prior to the availability of system hardware.
  
• Test networking features, including MAC-based switching and IP routing, class-based Pause, VLANs, spanning tree, link aggregation, ACLs and statistics.
  
• Leverage the embedded FPGA to test and implement proprietary features like advanced congestion management or load balancing.

"Aquantia's industry leading PHYs, paired with Fulcrum's latest generation high-performance Ethernet switches, provide OEMs a path to intercept the market entry of LOM-based servers with mainstream Top-of-Rack switches," stated Kamal Dalmia, vice president, marketing and sales, Aquantia. "This new reference design will accelerate the adoption of 10GBASE-T."

"Recently we have seen very strong growth in 10 Gigabit Ethernet server connectivity," added Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research, Inc. "Going forward I expect that 10GBASE-T will play a critical role in the acceleration of adoption, particularly in high-volume rack server platforms. This, in turn, will further drive the demand for high-density Top-of-Rack and End-of-Row switches."

"10GBASE-T is one of the critical interconnect technologies for top-of-rack switching implementations to achieve the highest port densities and smallest footprint," added Gary Lee, director of product marketing for Fulcrum Microsystems. "Aquantia's 40nm PHYs are a perfect fit in this reference platform for their reach, robust performance, low power consumption and high density. The Amsterdam platform powerfully complements our high-performance SFP+ reference designs with a platform that fully addresses mainstream datacenter applications."

Fulcrum's new FM6000 series of 10G/40G Ethernet switches provides the highest packet processing performance in the industry, operating over 1 billion packets per second while maintaining cut-through latencies of less than 300nS. In addition, the adaptable FlexPipeTM frame processing pipeline allows the FM6000 series to adapt to changing industry standards such as TRILL and VEPA or implementations of proprietary frame formats.

Fulcrum announced today in a separate release its launch of a new SFP+-centric reference platform code-named Barcelona. It also recently announced its FocalPoint FM6000 family.

Aquantia's 40nm devices build upon its disruptive, patent-protected, Mixed-Mode Signal Processing architecture. The net advantage of this architecture is lower power consumption, higher density and lower cost compared to competitive approaches. Aquantia is currently sampling its full portfolio of 40nm 10GBASE-T PHYs, ranging from quad to single-port configurations. Details of the Amsterdam reference platform can be found in a newly-released Product Brief on the Aquantia website.