Switch from start-up targets congestion

Start-up Teak Technologies debuted a 10G Ethernet switch for blade servers this week. The hook is a new traffic-management and congestion-detection technology built into the hardware, which, the company says, eliminates latency and makes standard 10G connections look slow.

Teak's I3000 is a 16-port 10G Ethernet switch fits into IBM BladeCenter chassis, and provides 14 internal 10G Ethernet interfaces for blade servers, and up to four uplink connections connecting the chassis to a data-center network. The vendor says its "Congestion Free Ethernet" technology lets the switch communicate with other Teak switch blades in a data-center network and coordinate traffic flows to avoid dropped packets and delays. The company claims its switch technology is cheaper and provides more reliable links than standard 10G Ethernet switches connecting to a blade server chassis, or other in-the-chassis blade server switches.

"Data-center switches have behaved in isolated silos — traffic is just thrown at them from the endpoints," says Sanjay Dua, chief marketing officer for Teak. "If the switch can handle it, it does, if not, it starts to drop packets. That's when congestion occurs, and application availability suffers due to latency."

Teak's switches work with special NICs in blade servers, developed with the start-up's congestion-management and protocol-offloading technology. Neterion, a maker of 10G Ethernet NICs, is the first partner to announce it is working with Teak. (It's Teak-infused NICs work with Microsoft Windows and Linux servers). The Neterion/Teak NICs and the blade server switch module communicate information about upstream network congestion, using Layer 2 signaling mechanisms.