10G Ethernet vendors look to stoke demand

Network vendors this week are expected to introduce a variety of 10G Ethernet wares aimed at customers seeking to bump up bandwidth in large data centers and campus backbones.

Products range from 10G Ethernet core switches to smaller "pizza box" 10G switches and network interface cards (NIC) that support copper.

Among the products expected to launch are:

• Enterasys Networks' X-Series core 10G Ethernet switch, based on carrier routing technology acquired from now-defunct Tenor Networks.

• New modules from Foundry Networks, adding eight-port 10G blades and CX4-based 10G copper links to the vendor's core switch.

• An all-copper 10GBase-CX4 switch from Fujitsu, for linking large servers in a data center.

• The industry's first copper 10G Ethernet server NIC from Chelsio Communications, based on the 10GBase-CX4 standard.

One organization that has had 10G Ethernet since 2002 is CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, where Enterasys' latest X-Series box will be installed. The 16-slot switch, with 2.56T bit/sec of total switch capacity, can hold up to 64 10G or 768 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a chassis.

CERN now uses 10G switches from Foundry, Cisco and Enterasys. It plans to put in an Enterasys X-Series box outfitted entirely with 10G Ethernet ports as an aggregation switch. The box will move data collected from supercomputing clusters to storage systems, according to Wolfgang von Rüden, head of IT at CERN.

"Our bandwidth needs right now are enormous and always growing," von Rüden says. Many of the hundreds of experiments at CERN are capable of producing consistent datastreams at 6G to 7G bit/sec over days or weeks, he says.

Another organization getting its feet wet with 10G is Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, which plans to install Foundry MG8 switches with 10G Ethernet uplinks. These boxes will connect to a regional fiber loop around the city. The effort will upgrade the school's campus ring bandwidth from 155M bit/sec OC-3 SONET.

"We're going to put these switches in and see what all the hype is about" with 10G Ethernet, says Wayne Dunwoody, director of network technology at Florida A&M. He says he hopes the 10G Ethernet loop will provide a backbone that is faster and as reliable as the current OC-3 ring. If it works out, Dunwoody says, the school plans to boost its multimedia applications, such as IP video broadcasts, while increasing its distance-learning offerings, which integrate video, document sharing and other collaboration applications for students taking courses from satellite schools in Tallahassee.

With its X-Series, Enterasys is bringing carrier technology into its enterprise product line. The box was built primarily by engineers formerly with Tenor, a multi-service carrier switch start-up that went bankrupt last year. Enterasys bought Tenor's technology and hired its core engineers shortly after the firm's closing. The X-Series is the first product to result from the Tenor purchase.

Enterasys CTO John Roese says the new box is more than a Tenor switch wearing an Enterasys sticker. The switch was also fitted with technology - ASICs and software - that lets it work with Enterasys' LAN switch security strategy, Secure Networks. This strategy lets switches identify network attacks and shut down connections, or isolate traffic onto secure virtual LANs. The X-Series surpasses Enterasys' previous high-capacity backbone N series switches introduced last year.

Roese says carrier-class attributes of the X-Series include separation of areas called the control plane and the data plane. The control plane handles switch management and configurations, while the data plane concerns a switch's packet-moving and routing processes.

Some competitive products, such as those from Cisco and Foundry, operate control plane and data plane functions in the same software and hardware. In the X-Series, they are kept separate in the circuitry to allow the switch to continue operating if certain hardware within the device fails. This separation also makes it harder for a network attacker to bring down an X-Series switch by accessing the device's configuration console through such insecure telnet links or glitches in other management interfaces. Force10 Networks' E series and Juniper's routers also use this approach.