SYSTEMS
Fulcrum Microsystems To Demo Comprehensive 10-Gigabit Ethernet Congestion Management at Interop 2009
Company Unveils Support for Enhanced Transmission Selection Enabling
Lossless Storage Traffic on 10GbE Networks
Fulcrum Microsystems will be showcasing new Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) capabilities in its FocalPoint 10GbE switches at its booth at the Interop 2009 conference (#2727).
ETS is an IEEE Data Center Bridging feature that is combined with FocalPoint’s support for IEEE 802.3x class-based pause congestion management capabilities to provide lossless operation and minimum bandwidth guarantees for storage traffic. This is yet another achievement in Fulcrum’s on-going development of comprehensive lossless Ethernet fabric technology for the data center.
“Fulcrum is dedicated to providing its customers with unparallel performance, capabilities and scalability,” said Mike Zeile, President and COO of Fulcrum Microsystems. “Adding ETS support is an achievement that complements our demonstration of IEEE Priority Flow Control (PFC) and quantized congestion notification (QCN) at SC08 last fall and shows customers how Fulcrum’s FocalPoint family can be used in converged network applications.”
ETS provides special traffic classes such as storage or video with minimum bandwidth guarantees at congested egress ports. When combined with the lossless operation available with PFC, FocalPoint can classify special traffic such as storage and provide it with bounded latency, which is required for converged data center fabrics. A Fulcrum 24-port 10G Ethernet “Reno” reference platform will be used to demonstrate ETS by directing two full bandwidth ingress flows to a single egress port. This will show that with ETS enabled, the egress bandwidth of the protected storage traffic will remain unaffected by disruptive data traffic.
In addition, Fulcrum will be participating in a multivendor Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and converged Ethernet demonstration at the Ethernet Alliance Interop booth, #527. A Fulcrum FocalPoint-based 24-port SFP+ “Monaco” reference design is used as the data center bridging (DCB) switch connected to two storage area networks (SANs) and will demonstrate how Monaco’s ETS implementation ensures lossless delivery and guaranteed bandwidth.