SYSTEMS
WOVEN SYSTEMS DELIVERS BREAKTHROUGH 'INVEST AS YOU GROW'
New Products Deliver Unprecedented Investment Flexibility and New Network Designs for Server Virtualization and Cloud Computing: Woven Systems today unveiled the industry’s first invest-as-you-grow multichassis and multipathing switching fabric that delivers wirespeed 10 GE and ultra-low latency. The Woven 10 GE Fabric, based on its vSCALE silicon technology, delivers an unprecedented price/performance breakthrough that, in small cost-effective steps, interconnects up to 2,000 10 GE server and storage devices at wirespeed and ultra-low latency while delivering four times the performance at one-fourth the price of traditional solutions. In addition, Woven’s 10 GE Fabric enables new data center network designs for server virtualization, Cloud Computing applications, and data center consolidation. Woven is introducing two new products working in conjunction with its 144 port 10 GE EFX 1000 chassis switch to deliver this innovation: The EFX 500, a compact 24-port 10 GE Fabric Switch, and the Woven Fabric Manager (WFM), a comprehensive management system for provisioning and monitoring Woven’s 10 GE Fabrics that is the industry’s first solution delivering real-time application and flow latency visualization.
Until now, legacy switches have required large upfront capital investments or expensive upgrades requiring data center budgets to grow ahead of the businesses they support. Woven’s product family of EFX 10 GE Fabric Switches depart from this legacy model by enabling its customers to grow their data center network cores in small steps of 12 wirespeed 10 GE ports at a time – an invest-as-you-grow model. Woven’s customers can start with small server and storage clusters and, in small steps, grow their networks at pace with their businesses to interconnect thousands of external 10 GE devices. Each small step expands a data center network core or fabric that delivers wirespeed 10 GE with ultra-low latency and no congestion. Woven’s Invest-As-You-Grow Wirespeed 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fabric As data centers continue to grow in server compute power and storage capacity, network investments should scale in parallel. Using a Clos (“Fat-tree”) design and only standards-based Layer 2 protocols, Woven’s multichassis 10 GE Fabric connects multiple active paths (up to 12 paths) from the EFX 500 edge switches to the EFX 1000 spine switches creating a 10 GE fabric that can interconnect up to 2000 wirespeed 10 Gigabit Ethernet devices. Woven’s custom vSCALE™ data center Ethernet switching silicon dynamically moves traffic to the lowest latency 10 GE path, thereby load balancing traffic efficiently, minimizing latency, and avoiding congestion. This is critical to new data center networks that must accommodate high bandwidth utilization and dynamic traffic patterns created by server virtualization, Cloud Computing, and high-performance computing designs. Further, Woven’s 10 GE Fabric is the only networking solution that provides network operators with real-time tracking, monitoring, visualization and reporting per application flow with real-time per flow latency measurement. EFX 500 Ethernet Fabric Switch The EFX 500 Ethernet Fabric Switch is a compact 24-port 10 GE switch designed with the vSCALE technology employed in Woven’s 144-port 10 GE EFX 1000 chassis. vSCALE provides Dynamic Congestion Avoidance for automatically balancing traffic flows in real-time in a multipath (up to 12 paths) 10 GE fabric with ultra-low, cut-through latency, and rapid failover (less than 10 microseconds). The 24 wirespeed 10 GE ports can be configured with SFP+ or CX4 interfaces; separate 1 GE and serial ports are available for out-of-band management. High availability features include redundant power supplies, and redundant reversible cooling fans. Its compact form factor, at only 1RU, makes the EFX 500 ideal for deployment at the 10 GE fabric edge. Connecting to the EFX 1000, the EFX 500 creates a multipath 10 GE fabric that gives customers the flexibility to deploy wirespeed or oversubscribed configurations, and the ability to scale these networks incrementally as customers’ computing and storage infrastructure grows. Woven Fabric Manager The Woven Fabric Manager (WFM) is the provisioning, real-time visualization, reporting and analysis tool for Woven’s entire product line. WFM leverages vSCALE’s real-time flow latency tracking to report multichassis fabric topology status and monitor real-time traffic flows along all paths to assess a variety of performance metrics, including latency and jitter. Operators can also evaluate historic and real-time performance statistics for individual flows and ports. WFM leverages standard-based instrumentation such as SNMP and IPFIX for statistics collection and reporting. WFM provides full and centralized control over all systems, and their interfaces, configurations, software loads, and status. Programmable scripting, and constant monitoring and logging make WFM a valuable tool for routine operations, troubleshooting, reporting, and capacity planning needs. WFM is available for both Windows and Linux operating systems, leverages web-based user interfaces, and supports MySQL and Oracle databases. Pricing and Availability The EFX 500 and Woven Fabric Manager will begin to ship in January 2009. The EFX 1000 is available now. For pricing information, please visit its Web site).
