Switch, router cut from same cloth

Ken Cheng, vice president and general manager of the enterprise business unit, said designing for 40-Gbit/s scalability demanded proprietary, semicustom designs for both switching fabrics and packet processors. The 80 million-transistor crosspoint switching ASICs offer a port-to-port switching latency of less than 10 microseconds.

The architecture has three separate switching-fabric backplanes: a 640-Gbit/s backplane fabric for data path operations, a 640-Gbit/s local switching fabric for operations between switching cards and a 20-Gbit/s management fabric for operations on the control plane.

The first system to implement the architecture is the BigIron MG8, with a capacity of 1.28 terabits/s in a single chassis and 4 Tbits/s in a multichassis rack. Low-power line cards and Xenpak optical modules push system capacity to thirty-two 10-Gbit Ethernet ports per system, or 96 ports/rack. Each port can handle up to 64,000 Layer 2 or 3 entries.

The MG8 is designed for redundancy and high availability, incorporating redundant power supplies and control-plane management modules, and hot-pluggable interface modules. Fault tolerance is provided at both Layers 2 and 3 using Foundry's Metro Ring Protocol and Virtual Switch Redundancy Protocol. Foundry has updated its IronWare software to a new multitasking kernel for faster performance.

The MG8 is intended for four enterprise applications: grid computing, 10-Gbit distribution of gigabit services, 10-Gbit campus networks and network-attached storage clusters. For true access routing in the metro network, Foundry has used the same basic architecture to develop the NetIron 40G, its vehicle for moving to 40-Gbit/s links in the future.

The 40G boasts 1.28-Tbit capacity per system and 4-Tbit capacity per rack, full hot-swappability, redundant management processors and support for up to 4 million Border Gateway Protocol routes with 2 Gbytes of embedded SDRAM. But it adds a local route processor on each interface module so that an entire route table is kept locally at each network interface, using the route processor and local ternary CAMs. Also unique is full environmental hardening and NEBS compliance.

Complete with four-port 10-Gbit interface cards, the MG8 will start at $64,995 and the NetIron 40G at $94,995. Management processor cards will start at $14,995 for the MG8 and $19,995 for the 40G.

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