Woven Systems unveils 10G Ethernet switch

Start-up Woven Systems this week is expected to launch its 10G Ethernet data center switch -- a box the company says one-ups the switching power of Cisco, Force10 Networks and Foundry Networks 10G gear and matches the low-latency performance of Fibre Channel and InfiniBand with lower-cost Ethernet technology.

At 144 non-blocking 10G Ethernet ports, Woven says its EFX 1000 switch provides the highest port density and capacity in the industry. The switch includes low-latency packet processors and congestion-detection mechanisms, which mimic Fibre Channel or InfiniBand performance but with less cost and better manageability, Woven says. As many as 4,000 of the 10G switch ports can be configured as a single virtual switch, or fabric, for connecting servers, storage and other network devices in a data center at very high speeds.

Click to see: Woven's 10G Ethernet fabric

The 12-slot EFX 1000 chassis uses 12-port 10GBase-CX4 Ethernet line cards and has a redundant backplane with a capacity of 2.8Tbps to allow every port on the switch to run at line-rate. Speeds and feeds aside, Woven says the key to its product is its vSCALE packet processors -- three on each blade -- which allow the boxes to connect as a fully redundant, multipath mesh while using standard Layer 2 Ethernet technology.

This setup differs from standard Layer 2 networks, where Spanning Tree Protocol closes off all but the primary uplink path of a LAN switch, only activating the alternate paths when the link fails -- a process that can take up to a half-second or more.

Woven Systems says its technology allows a switch to have multiple paths to other switches in the network that are always active and can move traffic among any other switches in the mesh. The multipath Layer 2 network also allows for near-instantaneous failover of network connections to alternate paths, with switchover time in the sub-10-microsecond range (10 millionths of a second). Traffic latency from port-to-port inside a system measures around 1.5 microseconds, and latency among interconnected Woven switches is around 4 microseconds. The company says this low-latency performance of its switches is on par with other high-speed/low-latency interconnect technologies, such as InfiniBand, Myrinet or Fibre Channel.