Blade dishes loss-less Ethernet wonder

Making the FCoE dream happen

By Paul Roberts at Blocks and Files • Get more from this author

Posted in Enterprise, 24th April 2008 20:20 GMT

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Blade Network Technologies has announced RackSwitch, the first loss-less Ethernet switch, needed for FCoE storage networking.

RackSwitch is a top-of-rack product that provides Ethernet switching for an entire rack of blade servers and storage. The gigabit and 10 Gbit Ethernet ports in it are aggregated into a single virtual switch, facilitating the movement of virtual machines from one blade server to another. Blade says its product draws substantially less electricity and facilitates more efficient rack cooling than competing switch products.

There are two models:

- RackSwitch G8100 - a 1U top-of-rack switch with 24 loss-less, low-latency 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GE) ports, is designed for emerging high-volume 10 GE application environments, high-performance clusters that require latency of 300 nanoseconds or less and/or as a 10 GE aggregation switch.

- RackSwitch G8000 - a 1U top-of-rack switch equipped with 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports and four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports for uplinks and/or stacking, is designed for rack-level server connectivity, Web 2.0 cloud clusters and/or as a Gigabit aggregation switch.

Blade states that the RackSwitch G8100 is the first Ethernet switch to deliver the loss-less I/O required to carry Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) storage traffic across Ethernet networks based on the emerging standards for Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE).

CEE is an enhanced version of Ethernet for data centers which adds flow control and congestion notification across multiple lanes of high-performance data and storage traffic on a single, unified Ethernet fabric.

The new RackSwitch products are available in June 2008. The RackSwitch G8000 is priced starting at $5,495. The RackSwitch G8100 is priced starting at $11,950—under $500 per 10 Gigabit Ethernet port.

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