10GbE switches target datacentre

Force10 Networks adds to its S-Series of datacentre switches with a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch

Force10 Networks will today add to its S-series of datacentre switches by announcing the S2410, a 24-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) switch which comes in two versions, one using 10Gbit/s small form factor fibreoptic (XFP) connections and the other using 10GbE CX4 copper connectors.

Force10 marketing vice-president Steve Garrison said, “The three characteristics IT managers normally [want are] low cost per port; high port density, so that they don’t have to use much space and power to achieve good aggregation capabilities; and lastly low latency for some types of application today – also for the concept of virtualising applications tomorrow.”

Garrison added, “We’re using a single Asic [application-specific integrated circuit] in this box. This brings in low latency but it also helps reduce cost, because in a typical fixed-configuration box you have one Asic driving the bandwidth of the ports and another Asic to do the switching. We have one Asic doing both, giving reduced complexity, latency and price.”

Force10 said that this switch could benefit companies in several areas, including data warehousing where “in Europe there seems to be a lot more regulation relating to data protection and how long data has to be stored for”.

Force10 said the switch could also be useful for cluster computing. “There are specific applications for this today, such as email, which you can now build on a clustered blade environment using Microsoft’s cluster software,” said a spokesman. “If one of the blades ‘breaks’, the application [fails over to a new blade and] keeps going. The promise over the next three to five years is to have all these apps sitting in a virtual pool that are dynamically provisioned by user demand – that’s the holy grail.”

Garrison said that a rack of blades with Gigabit Ethernet links could have data output rates of between 1.5Gbit/s and 2Gbit/s so it would be better to use 10 Gigabit Ethernet links to aggregate the blades’ output, as Gigabit Ethernet trunking “wouldn’t give you the kind of performance you were expecting”.

The S2410 will ship in April, priced at $20,000 (£11,500) for the XFP version and $14,400 (£8,300) for the CX4 version. Analyst firm Dell’Oro predicts that over the next five years 23 million 10GbE ports will ship, worth $14bn.