Interesting. Although, I'm still not convinced it's a single switching
asic. The switch chip is, of course, not the only "chip" in the switch.
This article says the "networking protocols" run on a single chip. The
official Voltaire press release at
http://www.voltaire.com/NewsAndEvents/Press_Releases/press2010/Voltaire_Announces_High_Density_10_GbE_Switch_for_Efficient_Scaling_of_Cloud_Networks
doesn't say anything about a single switching asic - perhaps the author
made an assumption about the product? You'd think they would really tout
the fact if they had a single chip that dense.
Last time I talked with the Arista people, their nonblocking 48 port
switch (one of two options for a 48-port switch, IIRC) was not a single
chip - it was a non-blocking 6-chip CLOS design. And, I agree, the price
was compelling.
So I still think there's not a 48 port 10GbE switch chip, at least not
in merchant silicon. I don't know much about what cisco is cooking up on
10GbE. I know Juniper was rebranding BNT (which was fulcrum-based). I
also heard about Extreme's top of rack 10GbE but it was only 24 ports -
you have to stack two of them together to get 48 ports.
So my answer to your original question is that since there's not
single-chip 48p, you still have to chain together 24-port chips to get
line-rate 10GbE performance. I'm happy to be corrected, of course - but
a seemingly misguided statement in an article in the trade press doesn't
seem like a very good product announcement for an innovation like that.
Tom
On 09/02/2010 12:00 AM, Greg Lindahl wrote:
Press about the new Voltaire 6048 48p 10g switch indicates that it's a
single switch chip:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/30/voltaire_vantage_6048/
Arista seems to have a similar product at a similarish list price, and
that list price is a lot less than chassis switches using 24p silicon.
Fujitsu isn't selling a 48p switch, and I'm not up enough on silicon
vendors to tell you if Fulcrum is still the only other vendor. I
used to know this stuff, then I left HPC to build a search engine :-)
-- greg
On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 10:15:25PM -0600, Tom Ammon wrote:
I hadn't heard about any 48-port 10GbE switch chips. Fulcrum and Dune
don't show anything like that on their websites. Where did you hear
about 48-port 10G asics? 24-port chips are pretty easy to find, but I
hadn't heard about 48-port'ers.
Tom
On 09/01/2010 07:17 PM, Greg Lindahl wrote:
I'm in the market for 48-port 10gig switches (preferably not a
chassis), and was wondering if anyone other than Arista and (soon)
Voltaire makes them? Force10 seems to only have a chassis that big?
Cisco isn't my favorite vendor anyway. One would think that the
availability of a single-chip 48-port 10gig chip would lead to more
than just 2 vendors selling 'em.
-- greg
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Network Engineer
Office: 801.587.0976
Mobile: 801.674.9273
Center for High Performance Computing
University of Utah
http://www.chpc.utah.edu
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