Mellanox ships 12.8Tbit per second Ethernet switches
Based on the Spectrum-3 ASIC, the SN4000 is claimed to be the world’s most scalable, agile and flexible 100/200/400GbE 12.8Tbits per second switch for a new generation of efficient data centres, the SN4000 Ethernet switches are available from Mellanox Technologies.
The SN4000 family is powered by Spectrum-3, the scalable 12.8Tbits per second Ethernet switch ASIC, which is optimised for cloud, Ethernet storage fabric and artificial intelligence (AI) interconnect applications. SN4000 platforms come in flexible form factors supporting a combination of up to 32 ports of 400GbE, 64 ports of 200GbE and 128 ports of 100/50/25/10GbE. The SN4000 platforms complement the 200/400GbE SN3000 leaf switches to form an efficient and high bandwidth leaf/spine network, adds Mellanox.
According to the company, Spectrum-3 supports unprecedented scale, tunnelling, and network virtualisation capabilities via FlexFlow packet processing technology and What-Just-Happened (WJH)- based, real-time, granular telemetry to simplify network operations and dramatically reduce mean time to issue resolution.
Spectrum-3 is suitable for building massive, high-performance layer-2 and layer-3 fabrics, for both virtualised and non-virtualised use cases.
The switches offer up to 200,000 network address translation (NAT) entries and one million on-chip routes. There is also a shared packet buffer to maximise burst absorption and deliver fair bandwidth sharing.
They also offer simultaneous NRZ and PAM4 port speeds allowing flexible configurations and dual stack IPV4 and IPV6 protocol operation.
There is support for overlay protocols including EVPN, VXLAN-GPE, MPLS-over-GRE/UDP, NSH, NVGRE, MPLS/IPv6 based segment routing and Flowlet-based adaptive routing to maximises performance and network utilisation for layer-3 fabrics with high cross-sectional bandwidth.
Spectrum-3 is the latest addition to a broad portfolio of software and hardware products based on Ethernet Cloud Fabric (ECF) technology and is backwards-compatible with earlier Spectrum models at a software development kit level. Like other switches in the Spectrum family, Spectrum-3 is ONIE-bootable and supports a choice of open Network Operating Systems (NOS) including Mellanox Onyx, DENT, SONiC, and Cumulus.
https://www.mellanox.com
