Pica8 announced support for white box switches powered by Broadcom’s latest chipset, Tomahawk, which enables line rate 100G Ethernet, as well as support for 25G and 50G Ethernet.
To support Tomahawk, Pica8 has ported its network operating system, PicOS, to Inventec’s DCS Series 1-RU top of rack switch, which comes with 32x100G QSFP28 ports. Pica8 said it has limited samples of Inventec’s Tomahawk platform available for testing.
“Our go-to-market model is through hardware ecosystem partners, giving customers and integrators choice in which platform they use,” said Olivier Vautrin, head of product management for Pica8, “We are excited to support 100G on Inventec’s DCS Switch platform. We see demand for 100G now and believe white boxes will continue to take significant share in the coming months.”
“Inventec’s partnership with Pica8 and the porting of PicOS to the DCS7032Q28 is a testament of how open solutions are changing the face of networking technology,” said Alex Johnstone, Product Line Manager, Inventec Network Infrastructure Design Center. “Customers can now leverage the world-class design, distribution and support capabilities of Inventec coupled with an advanced-technology, feature-rich operating system from Pica8. The net result is a high-value and economically efficient solution for our customer’s complex business challenges.”
“We are currently experiencing high demand in a faster alternatives for 10 GbE interfaces, especially for so called Software Defined Storage, and we want to move to a white box model for our data center to create the operational flexibility we have on our server side,” said Oleg Alekseenko, CIO of CloudDC. “Being able to leverage an industry-standard CLI minimizes integration risk, and having Linux for DevOps automation gives us the best of both worlds. In a world where dumb white boxes rule the network, the choice of software for your switches is very important. It’s not all about reducing costs; it’s also about getting technical and strategic business advantages.”
In September 2014, Broadcom introduced its next-generation, StrataXGS “Tomahawk” switch, packing 2 Tbps of switching performance in a single chip that is capable of supporting 32 ports of 100 Gigabit Ethernet, 64 ports of 40GE/50GE or 128 ports of 25GE. The new chip, which represents the 7th generation of Broadcom Ethernet switching silicon, is designed for the programmable fabrics needed in next-gen, cloud-scale data centers. The StrataXGS Tomahawk Series is powered by more than 7 billion integrated transistors in 28nm. It supports new 25GE and 50GE protocol standards, and is the first chip to scale to 32-ports of 100G on a single device.
Significantly, Tomahawk implements Broadcom’s FLEXGS and Smart-Flow technology, enabling the switch to be software configured for specific policies while preserving deterministic latency. The new design brings a 12X increase in application policy scale compared to previous generation switches, along with increased flexibility of packet lookups and key generation, and rich load balancing and traffic redirection controls.
StrataXGS Tomahawk Key Features
- 3.2 Tbps multilayer Ethernet switching
- Integrated low-power 25Ghz SERDES
- Authoritative support for 25G and 50G Ethernet Consortium specification
- Configurable pipeline latency enabling sub 400ns port-to-port operation
- Supports high performance storage/RDMA protocols including RoCE and RoCEv2
- BroadView instrumentation: provides switch- and network-level telemetry
- High-density FleXGS flow processing for configurable forwarding/match/action capabilities
- OpenFlow 1.3+ support using Broadcom OF-DPA
- Comprehensive overlay and tunneling support including VXLAN, NVGRE, MPLS, SPB
- Flexible policy enforcement for existing and new virtualization protocols
- Enhanced Smart-Hash™ load balancing modes for leaf-spine congestion avoidance
- Integrated Smart-Buffer™ technology with 5X greater performance versus static buffering
- Single-chip and multi-chip HiGig™ solutions for top-of-rack and scalable chassis applications
