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| Broadcom Intros New 10GbE Switch Broadcom has announced a new 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) switch that provides 240 Gigabits of multi-layer switching capacity on a single chip. The new Broadcom chip uses 65 nanometer process technology to achieve the industry's lowest power consumption, ultimately enabling 'green' data centers. Data centers host all Web content and critical business assets and, as such, 10GbE connectivity is crucial in meeting capacity requirements. Broadcom's new 10GbE switch provides data centers with greater density at a lower power. This enables cooler operations that better support a fluctuating volume of users due to the rich multimedia content associated with Web 2.0, online video-on-demand, social networking and interactive gaming. By upgrading its data center with Broadcom's 65nm 10GbE switches, a single 40,000 square foot data center could save enough power annually to light the Las Vegas strip for 12 hours. Broadcom was the first to introduce 10GbE switching silicon in 2002 and continues to be the only chip company in the world that can provide the major networking components (switches, physical layer devices, controllers and serializers/deserializers) needed to build a complete 10GbE-based data center. Data center traffic can now easily migrate from GbE to 10GbE, with storage, clustering, voice, video and data converged onto a single 10GbE unified network fabric. This converged environment facilitates network virtualization eliminating the need for deploying and maintaining separate, disparate fabrics such as Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and others. People today are accessing diverse types of content at a greater rate than ever before. Regardless of the activity, the content from photos and video to software applications and online gaming primarily resides in the data center and is accessed remotely. 10GbE is crucial to meet the bandwidth requirements since GbE can no longer handle the increased network traffic. Data center expansion and scalability is also necessary to support popular online activities such as social networking and streaming video. These activities, like the release of a hot new music video or an online movie, can cause a spontaneous influx of millions of simultaneous users creating situations where the data center must scale quickly to support an immediate demand for content. In the enterprise, the data center houses the company's most important assets - its intellectual property, customer databases and financial information. Access to this data, and other software services such as customer relationship management, must be reliable, secure and available 24/7 to support a large worldwide workforce. Announced is the Broadcom BCM56820 10GbE multi-layer switch designed to enable growth in all segments of the data center market. The BCM56820 is the latest member of the StrataXGS Ethernet switch family and supports the scalability necessary for Web 2.0 support, the reliability and security required for enterprise applications, as well as the bandwidth and quality of service needed to deliver rich multimedia content such as IPTV. One key feature of the BCM56820 is Broadcom's service aware flow control (SAFC) technology, which enables data center Ethernet (DCE). In this converged 10 Gigabit Ethernet-based fabric, SAFC greatly improves performance in data centers by ensuring that there is no loss of data on the network. It guarantees reliable delivery of sensitive network traffic such as storage, while extending priority access to time-critical applications such as clustering and video. Broadcom's StrataXGS BCM56820 series includes two new products: the BCM56820 and BCM56821. The series includes the following features: . Broadcom's unique multi-stage ContentAware engine supporting deep packet inspection and classification for traffic flow identification and policy application . Layer 2 (L2), VLAN switching and Layer 3 (L3) routing support including IPv6; . Advanced QoS for converged networking applications including per-priority pause/priority flow control (PPP/PFC); . Improved Broadcom HiGigT stacking technology for increased scalability; . Non-blocking performance, switching more than 375 million packets per second; . 24-port and 20-port versions available. Each port can support Fast Ethernet (FE), GbE, 2.5GbE or 10GbE connectivity. The 65nm process is the most advanced lithographic node for manufacturing semiconductors in large volumes today. It provides significant benefits over 90nm and 130nm processes by enabling lower power consumption, smaller size, higher yields and higher levels of integration. write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Networking News :: home page |