Fulcrum Microsystems today announced six new members of its industry-leading FocalPoint family of 10-Gigabit Ethernet switch chips – adding high-performance routing with its FM4000-series devices. With the industry’s highest port density and lowest latency, as well as a full suite of Datacenter Ethernet functions, FocalPoint is the first switch that can enable datacenter networks to scale into the thousands of nodes.
The FM4000 chips are designed for datacenter switching platforms for high-performance computing, server and storage host interconnect, and datacenter aggregation applications. They are complete layer 2/3/4 IP switch/routers with full line-rate performance on all ports with a total throughput of 360 million packets per second. Fulcrum’s unique design technology means that the FocalPoint FM4000 chips boast the lowest latency in the industry – 300 nanoseconds as a full layer 3/4 router. This provides a highly responsive network fabric that exceeds the performance of specialty fabrics such as InfiniBand and Fibre Channel, and is well suited for the millions of messages per second performance needed for high-performance clustered-computing applications.
The 24-port density of the chip – also an industry best – enables it to be the interconnect foundation for extremely large clustered systems. When used in fat tree (or Clos) network architectures, the density and low latency mean the network can scale to 3,456 non-blocking nodes in three tiers of switching – well beyond that when additional tiers or managed under-provisioning are introduced.
“Centralized computing, networked applications and broadband mobility are driving an explosion in the build-out of highly-efficient, highly-scalable data centers, and Ethernet is the most bandwidth-efficient interconnect solution available,” said Mike Zeile, Fulcrum Microsystems vice president of marketing. “The FocalPoint FM4000 series enables switch makers to build scalable 10-Gigabit switch fabrics; we see this becoming a multi-billion dollar market opportunity in just a few years.”
FocalPoint is also the first to deliver on the promise of convergence and server and storage virtualization, with a complete set of advanced congestion management and traffic pruning capabilities, such as class-based pause, and fully-configurable access control lists (ACLs) – all of which can operate at full line rate with no performance degradation.
The first company that is announcing a product based on the FM4000 switch silicon is Arastra, a networking company founded and backed by well-known Silicon Valley veterans including Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. “The next generation of servers will have 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces standard on the motherboard, creating a need for cost-effective low-latency 10G Ethernet switches in the datacenter,” said Mansour Karam, director of marketing for Arastra. “Our new Arastra 7100 datacenter switch family uses the Fulcrum FM4000 chip to deliver a high-performance scalable 10G network solution that enables 10 Gigabit Ethernet to each server, improving server efficiency and utilization.”
The FocalPoint FM4000 product family consists of the FM4224, which offers 24 ports of 10-Gigabit Ethernet; the FM4212, which offers 12 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports; the FM4208, which offers eight 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports; the FM4112, which offers eight 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports, and 16 Gigabit Ethernet ports; the FM4104, which offers two 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports and eight Gigabit Ethernet ports; and the FM4103, which features two 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports and four Gigabit Ethernet ports. All of the 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports are XAUI SerDes interfaces, and can operate at 10Gbps or 10/100/1000/2500 SGMII modes. Similarly, all Gigabit Ethernet ports can operate in 10/100/1000/2500 SGMII modes.
FocalPoint FM4000 Technical Details
Other technical details of the FocalPoint FM4000 product family include:
Performance
- Up to 360Mpps performance as a switch or IPv4 or IPv6 router
- 300ns latency with IP routing and L3/L4 ACLs enabled
Layer 3
- IPv4 and IPv6 line-rate routing (up to 16k IPv4 and 4k IPv6 addresses)
- Fully-provisioned multicast routing (IGMP, PIM-SM, PIM-DM, DVMRP, bidir-PIM)
- Full VLAN replication with multicast routing
Layer 2
- 16k MAC addresses
- Multiple and Rapid Spanning Tree (802.1D, s, w)
- Independent and shared VLAN learning
Switch Virtualization and Scaling
- Stacking, fat trees, meshes, and rings
- Single point of management
- Multi-chip mirroring and link aggregation
Convergence Capabilities
- L2/L3/L4 traffic classification, metering, and policing
- Per-priority pause
- Shared memory partitions ensures traffic separation
- Flexible, multi-level scheduling
Security
- Port-based security (802.1X)
- MAC address security
- DOS prevention
Pricing and Availability
All FM4000 chips are pin-compatible with Fulcrum’s FocalPoint FM2000 200ns layer-two switches. The chips are currently sampling, with production shipments in Q1 2008. The flagship FM4224 device is priced at less than $25 per 10G port, in quantities of 1,000 pieces.
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