Force10 Networks this week is expected to announce a 90-port Gigabit Ethernet module for its E series chassis switches aimed at data centers with large server clusters.
The module is offered as a way for large companies and research organizations to plug dozens of servers into one switch via Gigabit Ethernet. This can help companies better manage server and switch hardware by plugging servers directly into a backbone device, eliminating multiple switches, the vendor says.
The module offers connectivity for 90 10/100/1000M bit/sec links and is intended for connecting racks of servers. This is the most Gigabit Ethernet connectivity in a single blade among competitive products from Cisco, Enterasys Networks, Extreme Networks and Foundry Networks, experts say. The Force10 blade uses the 380G bit/sec of bandwidth between module slots and the 5T bit/sec switch fabric inside Force10’s E1200 and E600 series boxes. Fully loaded, a 14-slot E1200 now can support up to 1,260 Gigabit Ethernet ports that simultaneously can run at full speed, the vendor says.
Most vendors offer 48-port Gigabit Ethernet blades as the highest density in a single module. Foundry last year released a 60-port Gigabit Ethernet module, although its BigIron MG8 switch has 40G bit/sec of bandwidth between module slots and the switch fabric.
Force 10’s module has 15 telco connection ports, each of which can be split into six Gigabit Ethernet ports via a RJ-45 patch panel. While vendors such as Cisco and Extreme have 96-port telco-connector-based modules, these blades support 10/100M bit/sec connections, and are generally deployed in wiring closets, where many end-user ports are aggregated into one switch chassis.
“It’s a heck of a lot of ports,” says Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with The Yankee Group. “What they’re trying to do is show the scalability of their box. None of the other guys can do 90-Gigabit ports at wire speed in a single blade right now.”
It is common for users to deploy telco-based switch modules, which use a patch panel to fan out connections to a greater number of ports that can physically fit on one blade. But these links typically were deployed for end-user connectivity and not on potentially critical server links in a data center.
“There might be a little bit of a stigma” about deploying telco ports for connecting servers in a data center, Kerravala says. But he says carriers have done this for some time and that if deployed with redundancy – two blades with redundant connections to dual-network interface card servers – hardware reliability is probably a non-issue.
The 90-port telco-based Gigabit Ethernet module costs $55,000.
