A new standard is making it possible to use Ethernet much like a bus technology, to create a LAN inside a chassis for communication among the various components within.
I recently spoke to Performance Technologies, a company that for a couple of decades has made board-level products for use in telecommunications gear, and many of the big names OEM products from the company. Performance Technologies is now pushing a specification to move beyond PCI speeds, approved last month by the PCI Industrial Computers Manufacturers Group (PICMG).
The specification, called PICMG 2.16, spells out how to use Ethernet technology to communicate among different components, says Ed Bizari, Performance Technologies' director of marketing. For instance, you could have a cluster of servers and a redundant pair of Ethernet switches contained within a single box. In this setup, " the chassis is now acting just like the enterprise, " Bizari says.
The advantage is fewer wires and therefore fewer potential points of failure. Such a feature is more critical in telco environments, but this technology might be used in enterprise gear as well.
Another advantage is the ability to use the chips that have been produced in volume along with the rise in Ethernet's popularity in the enterprise. Bizari says this could shorten the time it takes to develop chassis components and could make it easier to integrate them.
Performance Technologies is announcing a Layer 3 switch that uses the new specification, and the switch would plug into a chassis that also supports the standard. It has eight ports of Gigabit Ethernet, resulting in 16G bit/sec in full-duplex communication. By contrast, PCI maxxes out at about 4G bit/sec. Higher speeds using PICMG 2.16 are possible, Bizari says.
Systems supporting PICMG 2.16 are expected to be widely available next year.
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