Centec Networks announced its fourth-generation GoldenGate switch silicon, a 1.2 Tbps chip designed to address SDN and virtualization in 10GE, 40GE and 100GE networks by increasing visibility in the forwarding plane.
The company said it was able to incorporate a number of unique features to solve SDN challenges for elephant flow detection, flow completion time, and flow visibility and control, while also supporting network virtualization with diverse overlay technology including the latest GENEVE protocol.
Highlights:
- 1.2Tbps/1200Mpps switching capacity in small, 45x45mm FCPBGA 1825 package: GoldenGate provides 20 percent lower power consumption in a small footprint at half the cost of today’s dominant alternative silicon.
- Native 100GE uplink: GoldenGate supports the latest 10GE requirements with a 100GE uplink that is optimally configured for cost and power in a native 4x25G configuration, eliminating the need for an external 10x10G to 4x25G gearbox.
- Improved application-centric flow completion time and a better user experience for real-life environments including data centers with a diverse mix of short and long flows;
- Improved support for versatile network virtualization use cases, with diverse tunneling overlay technology to support VXLAN, NVGRE and the newest GENEVE protocol;
- Improved flow-level visibility and control in a solution that is VM-aware and supports detection of large (a.k.a. elephant) flows, uses enhanced Internet Protocol Flow Information eXport (IPFIX) technology to improve flow visibility, and includes software-defined counters with N-flow technology that support three stages of general OpenFlow processing with up to 64k flow tables;
- Improved fault protection mechanisms including hardware flow self-healing for equal-cost multi-path (ECMP) and link aggregation protocol (LAG) routing, and packet loss minimization on link failures; and
- Improved trouble-shooting, monitoring and analytics capabilities, ranging from active buffering and latency monitoring and logging, to the use of buffer and latency watermarks, microburst detection and logging, and enhanced Switch Port Analyzer (SPAN) for remote monitoring.
“With GoldenGate, Centec is extending its TransWarp™ product line to bring next-generation Ethernet switching silicon costs toward the same small premium over legacy industry solutions as was the case prior to the massive worldwide transition from 10/100Mbps Ethernet to 1GE networking,” said Tao Gu, vice president of business development for Centec Networks. “Centec is also taking 10GE switching silicon to lower power levels made possible using IBM process technology, while providing a key missing piece in switching silicon that the industry has needed in order for SDN to deliver on its value proposition.”
GoldenGate is available now with volume production scheduled for the third quarter of 2015.
