Fujitsu this week introduced a new stackable 10G Ethernet switch, targeted at connecting clustered servers for supercomputer and grid computing applications.

The XG2000 is a single-rack-unit switch with 20 10G Ethernet ports and a 400Gbps switching fabric capacity, enabling all ports — which can be fiber or copper — to run at full-duplex speed simultaneously, the company says. Some of the tasks Fujitsu has in mind for the switch are aggregating other 10G Ethernet switch links or connecting directly to 10G-capable servers.

High-performance computing features targeted at large data centers include a low switch latency as fast as 300 nanoseconds for the switch to process an Ethernet frame. The switch also supports jumbo frames, or Ethernet frames larger than the standard 1.5KB; the XG2000 can handle frame sizes as great as 15KB, which helps the switch move large amounts of data quickly without overworking its processors, the company says. Large 3MB stream buffers also help the switch handle bandwidth-intensive traffic flows, such as multimedia streams.

The device can be fitted with as many as 20 XFP (10G small-form-factor pluggable) optical ports, supporting long-reach single-mode (as much as 25 kilometers), or shorter-reach multimode fiber optic cabling (300 meters in range). Sixteen XFP ports for copper-based CX4 10G also can be supported, for short data-center links of up to 10 meters. (Four fiber XFPs can also operate with the 16 copper-based 10G ports in this configuration).

Click to see: Fujitsu’s XG2000 switch supports as many as 20 10G Ethernet ports and starts at $18,000.

The Fujitsu's XG2000 switch will compete with fixed-configuration 10G switches such as Force10 Networks' S2410, HP's ProCurve 6400 series and Foundry Networks' FastIron Edge X424F.

The XG2000 is available now for $18,000, excluding the price of SR, LR and CX4 XFP ports.